Is it possible to create a table and bar chart on the fly?

Question

I am a beginner in Latex, using it tentatively for industrial documents. I have reached a point where the anticipated benefits from using it in a Corporate environment appear to me very significant. I am trying to write a paper explaining this to my company. I have made a quick comparison in the table of the MWE below. However, (in order to demonstrate a unique capability of LaTex) I would like to illustrate the point by a bar chart, possibly generated on the fly from the raw data I would embed in the Latex source. I have been trying to use \pgfplotstableread and \pgfplotstabletypeset to generate the table instead of the tabular option, but I could not succeed, probably due to the white spaces of the text.

1. Could someone suggest a way to generate such a table outside of a tabular environment? Some reformatting of the text contents of the table is possible if there is no other way.
2. Is there a way to generate a bar chart illustrating the point of file size without manually entering the coordinates?

3. As a side request, could someone perhap suggest a presentation format that would provide the maximum evidence of the point illustrated?

   \documentclass[11pt]{article}
   \usepackage{graphicx}
   \usepackage{siunitx}
   \usepackage{pgfplotstable}
   \sisetup{table-figures-decimal = 3}
   \sisetup{table-number-alignment=center-decimal-marker}
   \begin{document}
   \centering
   \begin{table}
   \begin{tabular}{|l|S|S|}
   File type&{Word 2003}&{\LaTeX} \\
   \hline
   Native file size (Mo)& 1.07&.112\\
   Compressed native file size (Mo)&.268 & 0.022\\
   Final PDF file size (Mo) &.302& .272\\
   \end{tabular}
   \caption{Comparison of file size Word 2003 vs \LaTeX}
   \end{table}
   \end{document} 
   

Answer 1

You can generate a table and chart from basically any comma (or otherwise) delimited datafile. Here's an example for how your datapoints could be presented. I've chosen to transpose your datafile for the table, based on the idea that the numbers you want your audience to compare should be underneath each other, not next to each other. The transposition is done using \pgpflotstabletranspose.

I've made this example a bit fancy to show what can be done using \pgfplotstable. In a production environment, the code could be cleaned up a lot to use styles.

The datafile in this example is created using filecontents. In a real application, the CSV file would of course just live on the disk and be read by the TeX file.

In terms of the most effective presentation for this particular point, I think a simple column chart would be the most sensible choice, since it allows for a simple comparison of the pairs of data.

\documentclass[11pt]{article}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage{siunitx}
\usepackage{pgfplotstable}
\sisetup{
    table-figures-decimal = 3,
    table-number-alignment=center-decimal-marker
}
\usepackage{filecontents}
\usepackage{booktabs}

\begin{filecontents}{data.csv}
{File type},{Word 2003},{LaTeX}
Native,1.07,.112
Compressed native,.268,.022
Final PDF,.302,.272
\end{filecontents}

\pgfplotstableread[col sep=comma]{data.csv}{\datatable}
\pgfplotstabletranspose[colnames from=File type, input colnames to=File Type]{\transposed}{\datatable}

\begin{document}
\begin{table}
\centering
\pgfplotstabletypeset[
    string type,
    every head row/.style={
        before row={\toprule & \multicolumn{3}{c}{File size (Mo)}\\},
        after row=\midrule
    },
    every last row/.style={after row=\bottomrule},
    multicolumn names,
    display columns/0/.style={
        multicolumn names=l,
        column name={},
        column type=l
    },
    display columns/1/.style={column type=S},
    display columns/2/.style={column type=S},
    display columns/3/.style={column type=S},
    every row 0 column 0/.style={
        postproc cell content/.style={
            @cell content=\textcolor{cyan!50!black}{\textbf{##1}}
        }
    },
    every row 1 column 0/.style={
        postproc cell content/.style={
            @cell content=\textcolor{orange!75!black}{\textbf{##1}}
        }
    }
]{\transposed}
\caption{Comparison of file size Word 2003 vs \LaTeX}
\end{table}

\begin{figure}
\centering
\begin{tikzpicture}
\begin{axis}[
    ybar,
    xtick=data,
    xticklabels from table={\datatable}{[index]0},
    enlarge y limits=upper,
    ymin=0,
    ylabel=File size (Mo),
    legend entries={Word 2003, \LaTeX}
]
\addplot [fill=cyan!70, draw=cyan!50!black]  table [
    x expr=\coordindex,
    y index=1] {\datatable};
\addplot[fill=orange, draw=orange!50!black] table [
    x expr=\coordindex,
    y index=2] {\datatable};
\end{axis}
\end{tikzpicture}
\caption{Graphical comparison of file size Word 2003 vs \LaTeX}
\end{figure}
\end{document}