[Tex/LaTex] Putting several footnotes below the table

Question

I'm having trouble putting notes below the table – I want to put several notes below the table but the footnote seems to stretch, making the table longer than necessary. Would there be a way to fix this?

\begin{table}[htbp]\centering \caption{Summary Statistics}
\begin{tabular}{l c c c}
\hline\hline
\multicolumn{1}{c}{\textbf{Variable}} & \textbf{Mean} & \textbf{Std. Dev.} & \textbf{N}\\
\hline
a & a & a & a \\
\hline
\label{table2}
\multicolumn{3}{l}{\textsuperscript{*}\footnotesize{blah blah}}
\end{tabular}
\end{table}

Answer 1

You should use the threeparttable package, that's designed for that sort of things. In the following code, I added the caption package, to ensure a proper spacing between caption and table, booktabs and the makecell package, that allows for common formatting of column heads.

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{booktabs, caption, makecell}
\renewcommand\theadfont{\bfseries}
\usepackage{threeparttable}

\begin{document}

\begin{table}[! htbp]\centering \caption{Summary Statistics}
\begin{threeparttable}
\begin{tabular}{l c c c}
\toprule\midrule
\thead{Variable} & \thead{Mean}
 & \thead{Std. Dev.} & \thead{N}\\ \midrule
a & a & a\tnote{*} & a \\
\bottomrule\addlinespace[1ex]
\end{tabular}
\begin{tablenotes}\footnotesize
\item[*] Blahblah
\end{tablenotes}
\end{threeparttable}
\label{table2}
\end{table}

\end{document}