Encyclopedic works are a synthesis of knowledge of a certain field of interest, and often of the whole human achievement at the time in which they arise. As highly informative works of a tertiary type, an important part of their concept is content structure, the purpose of which is to make them easier to understand and use. This paper explores the extent of tables, their means of organization, and their functionality in encyclopedic works. This research was conducted on well-known traditional (printed) encyclopedic works, such as the <i>Encyclopaedia Britannica</i>, <i>Encyclopedia Americana</i>, <i>Chambers’s Encyclopaedia</i>, <i>World Book Encyclopedia</i>, <i>Brockhaus Enzyklopädie</i>, <i>La Grande Encyclopédie</i>, as well as Croatian encyclopedic works: <i>Croatian Encyclopedia</i>, <i>Proleksis Encyclopedia</i>, <i>Croatian Encyclopedia of Technology</i>. Content analysis was conducted on tables in encyclopedic projects as important components of the structure of relevant data, providing an overview of the extent of tables and their content in selected encyclopedic works. By comparing the results of the content analysis of multiple encyclopedic works, differences, and similarities in table types and their content are shown to indicate possibilities and requisites when compiling such highly structured content. Furthermore, insight is provided into the functionalities of such structured content in online editions of some of these encyclopedic works as well as of <i>Wikipedia</i> as the most commonly used online encyclopaedia. The aim of this paper is to present the evolution of tables in encyclopedic works, from the mere rendering of systematized data in traditional works to tables as elements of structure in online works that can be used to develop ontologies, this, in turn, generates new possibilities in the development of encyclopedic studies and a new approach to the creation of online encyclopedic works.