Tables are ranges of data in the worksheet that have special behavior applied which allow users to better sort, analyze, format, manage, add, and delete data. Tables and table columns can also be referenced through formulas by the spreadsheet application using friendly names, making formula calculations that use tables much easier to understand and maintain. Tables provide a natural way for working with large sets of tabular data.

The tables described in this section are of the multi cell variety, as opposed to single cell tables created from XML mappings.

Each table gets its own xml part, and the relationship between a table part and the sheet is defined in the sheet's _rels directory. The sheet xml also references this id since there can be more than one table on a sheet. The sheet xml contains all the numeric and textual data, and the table xml records properties of the table as well as some formatting rules for data and text displayed in the table cells.