Question
How do we know if information is best presented tabularly?
Answer
When trying to determine whether or not a dataset is best represented tabularly, there are several factors to consider and this can very quickly become quite involved.
One important factor to consider when trying to determine how to best represent your data is “will my data have ragged rows?”. As tabular data is inherently rectangular, every rows of our dataset should have the same number of column headers. If there is a mismatch here, we will need to either store “missing values” within cells or consider a different data representation model.