Setting parent of a counter and removing counter from caption

Question

I guess, I have two questions.

My very concrete problem is that I want \caption{xyz} to not print a table counter within a table. By now it prints “Table 0.1: xyz“. How would I remove that?

But maybe I want to keep the “1”. How can I remove the section parent from the table counter such that my output becomes “Table 1:”?

Answer 1

If your tables really are numbered by section, the following should help:

\usepackage{chngcntr}
\counterwithout{table}{section}

See also Continuous v. per-chapter/section numbering of figures, tables, and other document elements.

To remove "Table N: " from "Table N: xyz", load the caption package in the preamble and use the starred macro version \caption*{xyz} inside table environments.