Creating or loading tables

Autory has many custom functions for creating or loading tables. They have the following in common:

• They create or load a table from somewhere.
• They ensure that the table exists in the output and can therefore be referenced by formulas.
• They return the table name. This may be different from the original table name.
• They allow SQL queries to be performed on the table. See SQL queries.
• They allow per-column data type detection / conversion to be performed on the table. See data types.

The functions are:

• csvToTable
• featherToTable
• excelTable
• projectionResultsToTable
• resultsJsonToTable
• sqlToTable
• table

Any one of these functions may be used anywhere that a table name is expected (e.g. TableLookup or tableSumIfs). They may also be used on their own to simply ensure that the table exists in the output.

To reference an entire column from one of these tables in a formula, use tableColumn. This is useful with formulas such as MATCH, INDEX, SUM, and MAX.

Column headers with Excel structured-reference characters

Autory uses structured references to reference table columns when performing calculations in Excel. If a column header contains [, ], #, ', or @, Excel requires those characters to be escaped inside the generated formula. Autory handles this automatically, so in your variable library formula, you should use the name as displayed, without adding escape quotes:

tableLookup("Table1", "row1", "bla # @ [ ] ' ! .")