Another neat trick is a latex package called Catchfilebetweentags. This let’s you have a text file with named data fields that you can insert into your document, like when you want to state a parameter that was used in a paragraph. Generating that text file as an artifact of the rest of the data processing means, e.g., that parameters my paper says I used are the ones that I actually used.

In other words, you don't do it by hand. I too rely on a tool to create my tables, which was my point. Doing it by hand is painful.