Error caption outside float when trying to caption a table

Question

I am trying to produce a caption to describe a table in LaTeX, however am getting an error: ! LaTeX Error: \caption outside float. The formulation of the table is:

\begin{center}
 \begin{tabular}{c| c c c} 
 Campus & Main & Jubilee & Kings Meadow \\ [0.5ex] 
 \hline
 Main         & 0 & 21.8 & 24.6 \\
 Jubilee      & 21.8 & 0 & 9.3 \\
 Kings Meadow & 24.6 & 9.3 & 0 \\
\end{tabular}
\caption{Table Description}
\end{center}

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Many thanks in advance

You can not use the \caption command outside of a table or figure environment. — leandriis, Sep 05 '19 at 12:10
Do you want your table to float? If so, surround tabular and \caption with a table environment (and replace the center environment with the \centering command). — leandriis, Sep 05 '19 at 12:10
captions are for tables or figures, not tabular or center environment. Here, you should enclosed your whole code with \begin{table} and \end{table}. — ebcontrol, Sep 05 '19 at 12:11
Thankyou for all the help, the table environment with the \centering command was exactly what i was looking for — sam, Sep 05 '19 at 12:13
Could i ask what it means for a table to float? And to what the difference between tabular and table is — sam, Sep 05 '19 at 12:15
@sam: Latex automatically places floats depending on how much space is left on a page. Floats are typically placed at the very top or the very botom of a page or at a page on their own. When using the table environment, you can add a caption to a tabular but the table will not necessarily show up exactly where you specified it in your code. — leandriis, Sep 05 '19 at 12:23
@sam: see also https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/214840/general-differences-between-array-table-tabular-tabularx-longtable-supertab — ebcontrol, Sep 05 '19 at 12:24
You can influence the position of a float (see here: Keeping tables/figures close to where they are mentioned and How to influence the position of float environments like figure and table in LaTeX?) If you prefer images and tabulars to not float but nevertheless want to add a caption, see here: Adding a Caption to a Non-float Environment — leandriis, Sep 05 '19 at 12:25
It behooves me to mention \captionof from the caption or capt-of packages. If I had designed LaTeX, I would have combined figure and table into float and used \captionof for both. — John Kormylo, Sep 05 '19 at 14:50

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 07 '19 at 20:55

Principially you have two possibilities to add captions to a table (same works for figures too with figure instead table):

You can use a non floating table (that means you do not use environment table, which makes the table floating) as shown in the first example of the following MWE, nearly the same you used in your code. Then you need to use command \captionof{table}{} to get a table caption for your table outside a float (you see the relevance to the error message you got?).
You can use a floating table with environment table. That means LaTeX is allowed to place the table inside the document at a place at its own. Usually that means the table is placed at the top of the page (as done in my MWE) or at the top of the next page ... Then you need to use command \caption{} to get a table caption ...

Please see the following MWE

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{caption} % <================================================
\usepackage{booktabs} % <================================= better tables
\usepackage{blindtext} % <======================= to generate dummy text 


\begin{document}

\begin{minipage}[c]{\linewidth}
\centering % <====================================== to center the table
\begin{tabular}{c| c c c} 
Campus & Main & Jubilee & Kings Meadow \\ [0.5ex] 
\hline
Main         & 0 & 21.8 & 24.6 \\
Jubilee      & 21.8 & 0 & 9.3 \\
Kings Meadow & 24.6 & 9.3 & 0 \\
\end{tabular}
\captionof{table}{Table Description} % <================== from package `caption`
\label{tab:campus} % <============================== to be referenacable
\end{minipage}

\blindtext

\begin{table}%[ht] % <====================================== let table float!
\centering
\begin{tabular}{c c c c} 
\toprule % <====================================== from package booktabs
Campus       & Main & Jubilee & Kings Meadow \\ [0.5ex] 
\midrule % <====================================== from package booktabs
Main         & 0    & 21.8    & 24.6 \\
Jubilee      & 21.8 & 0       & 9.3 \\
Kings Meadow & 24.6 & 9.3     & 0 \\
\bottomrule % <=================================== from package booktabs
\end{tabular}
\caption{Table Description a}
\label{tab:campusa}
\end{table}

Now we can reference table~\ref{tab:campus} and table~\ref{tab:campusa}.

\end{document}

and its result:

As you can see table two is floating at the top of the page, has a caption and is referencable as you can see in the last sentence. You can also see that I used package booktabs for better horizontal lines and I deleted the vertical line (try to do not use them!) in the second table.

If you do not want the table to float at the top of the same page you can try to use option [ht] for table environment:

 \begin{table}[ht] % <====================================== let table float!

If you remove the % before [ht] in the MWE above you get the changed result:

BTW: Have you considered to write the numberes aligned to the dezimal point? Numbers in tables looks better then IMHO. See package dcolumn or siunitx ...

Error caption outside float when trying to caption a table

1 Answers1