This paper presents a preprocessing step in mining association rules which uses tables to summarize synthetically the way variables interact by highlighting any zones which are attractive. Attractive zones are those which guarantee that potentially interesting rules will be extracted, and any irrelevant rules removed. These attractive zones will also make it possible to carry out a contextual discretization. In addition they constitute the starting point for mining association rules thereby decreasing the space where rules have to be searched for. Finally, this tabular representation of the behaviour of associations is particularly interesting in the case of quantitative variables where knowledge is no longer parsed.