In research, we usually publish the most important findings in tables and figures. When writing research papers using Rmarkdown (*.Rmd), we have several options to format the output of the final MS Word document (.docx).

Tables can be formated using either the knitr package’s kable() function or several functions of the pander package.

Figure sizes can be determined in the chunk options, e.g. {r name_of_chunk, fig.height=8, fig.width=12}.

However, options for customizing tables and figures are rather limited in Rmarkdown. Thus, I usually customize tables and figures in the final MS Word document.

In this blog post, I show how to quickly format tables and figures in the final MS Word document using a macro). MS Word macros are written in VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) and can be accessed from a menu list or from the tool bar and run by simply clicking. There are loads of tutorials explaining how to write a macro for MS Word, e.g Usman Javaid’s Create Macros In Word 2010.

The following two macros are very helpful to format drafts. Since I want drafts to be as compact as possible, tables and figures should not to be too space consuming.

The first macro called FormatTables customizes the format of all tables of the active MS Word document. With wdTableFormatGrid2, we use a table style predefined in MS Word. A list of other table styles can be found under the following link. Furthermore, we define font name (Arial) and font size (8 pt), space before (6 pt) and after (10 pt) the table. Finally, the row height is set to 18 pt exactly.

Sub FormatTables()

 Dim tbl As Table
    For Each tbl In ActiveDocument.Tables
         tbl.AutoFormat wdTableFormatGrid2
         tbl.Range.Font.Name = "Arial"
         tbl.Range.Font.Size = 8
         tbl.Range.ParagraphFormat.SpaceBefore = 6
         tbl.Range.ParagraphFormat.SpaceAfter = 10
         tbl.Range.Cells.SetHeight RowHeight:=18, HeightRule:=wdRowHeightExactly

    Next

End Sub

The second macro called FormatFigures merely reduces the size of all figures in the active MS Word document to 45% of its original size.

Sub FormatFigures()

Dim shp As InlineShape


For Each shp In ActiveDocument.InlineShapes
    shp.ScaleHeight = 45
    shp.ScaleWidth = 45
Next

End Sub

I hope you find this post useful and If you have any question please post a comment below. You are welcome to visit my personal blog Scripts and Statistics for more R tutorials.

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