The Guardian's latest university tables for you to play with - as a spreadsheet and with institution codes
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We hope these Guardian University Guide tables will help the more than 600,000 university applicants next year who face the toughest ever competition for places.

Our tables are unlike other newspapers in that a university's ranking is heavily weighted to how satisfied its final-year students say they are. Students across the country are asked to rate how happy they are with 22 measures, including one on their overall satisfaction with their course as part of the National Student Survey. Other tables rate universities according to how good their research is.

The tables were compiled by independent consultancy firm Intelligent Metrix. It's based originally on information collected by Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) and the National Student Survey, published by Higher Education Funding Council for England (Hefce).

Apart from students' satisfaction scores, they ranked the universities according to how much institutions spend per student; their student/staff ratio; the career prospects of their graduates six months after graduation; a value-added score and what grades pupils have to achieve to stand a chance of being offered a place.

In addition to the overall rankings, you can look up a particular subject and see which universities fare best and worst. You can even compile your own tables by sorting which course might be most suitable for you. Or why not make your own table based on the courses you are interested in, but rated according to the percentage of graduates in graduate-level jobs six months after graduation.

For those who want averages to compare all universities to, the following may be helpful:

• The average student-staff ratio was 17.7
• The average tariff was 304 Ucas points
• On average 63% of students went on to a graduate job or full-time study six months after graduation
• On average overall satisfaction score was 82.2%.

Go to our Education site if you'd like the sortable HTML version, but for everyone else, here it is in Google Docs. You can download the full data below. What can you do with it?

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