Much valuable information in documents is presented within tables. However, the information within tables is hard to extract automatically with high accuracy due to the wide variety and low quality of typical tables found in electronic documents. Information extraction technology can provide a method of extracting information from heterogeneous tables by recognizing tables, the header cells, and cells that are merged or should be merged, creating a richer representation of table structure and providing a convenient way of linking cells to their row and column headers. Use of this richer representation allows a few extraction patterns to successfully pull out information from a wide variety of differently formatted tables.