Importing data from an external file
It can be convenient to fetch the data for the row entries from an external file. This is particularly useful for large datasets, especially when the data originates from an external data source or application, such as an Excel spreadsheet. Such applications often provide an export feature, particularly exporting to a Comma-Separated Values (CSV) file. Such files have plain text format with a simple tabular structure, with each line representing a table row and commas separating the cells.
Only a few lines are needed to import such a CSV file into a LaTeX table.
How to do it...
We will load the datatool package, let it import data from a comma-separated file, sort it, and print it. Follow these steps:
- Store your data in the same folder as your main tex document. Here, we will use the data from the previous recipe, stored in a file named linux.csv:
Distribution,Hits MX Linux,2717 Mint,2097 EndeavourOS,2055 Manjaro,1382 Debian,1316...
