Positioning table captions in LaTeX

Question

When I try centering my table & getting a caption so that it reads something like "Table 1. This is the caption." the table appears at the top of the page no matter what I do. If I don't do the caption then I can get it in the part of the document that I want. How do I fix this problem?

\begin{table}
    \caption{This is the caption.}
    \begin{center}
        \begin{tabular}{ | l | l | l | l |}
        \hline

        ...

        \hline
        \end{tabular}
    \end{center}
\end{table}

Answer 1

Try

\begin{table}[h]
   ...
\end{table}

That tells latex "put the table here" instead of letting it float.

I also use

\usepackage{array}

in the preamble for pretty much all my latex documents, but pr0wl informs us that it is not necessary. Thanks pr0wl!

Answer 2

You can also try \usepackage{float} which gives you the extra positioning command H, which is really forces LaTeX to put the figure right where you specified. If you do use float, make sure to declare your labels after your captions.

In terms of making your figures apear "here", H>h!>h. But H! does nothing.