tabular and flextable

• tabular example
• turn it to a flextable
• Use row separator
• Enrich with flextable
• Add into a document

tabular example

Let’s create an crosstable of aggregations based on the penguins dataset provided by package ‘palmerpenguins’ (Horst, Hill, and Gorman 2022):

library(tables)
library(palmerpenguins)

Mean <- function(x) mean(x, na.rm = TRUE)

Sd <- function(x) sd(x, na.rm = TRUE)

tab <- tabular(
  table = (species + 1) * island ~ 
    (n = 1) + Format(digits = 2) * 
      (bill_depth_mm + body_mass_g) * (Mean + Sd), 
  data = penguins)
print(tab)
#>                                                                   
#>                          bill_depth_mm         body_mass_g        
#>  species   island    n   Mean          Sd      Mean        Sd     
#>  Adelie    Biscoe     44   18.37          1.19 3709.66      487.73
#>            Dream      56   18.25          1.13 3688.39      455.15
#>            Torgersen  52   18.43          1.34 3706.37      445.11
#>  Chinstrap Biscoe      0     NaN            NA     NaN          NA
#>            Dream      68   18.42          1.14 3733.09      384.34
#>            Torgersen   0     NaN            NA     NaN          NA
#>  Gentoo    Biscoe    124   14.98          0.98 5076.02      504.12
#>            Dream       0     NaN            NA     NaN          NA
#>            Torgersen   0     NaN            NA     NaN          NA
#>  All       Biscoe    168   15.87          1.82 4716.02      782.86
#>            Dream     124   18.34          1.13 3712.90      416.64
#>            Torgersen  52   18.43          1.34 3706.37      445.11

turn it to a flextable

A simple call to as_flextable() produces a flextable quite similar to the tabular outputs:

as_flextable(tab)

It uses flextable default settings when possible, we recommended to define them once per session.

set_flextable_defaults(
    .family = "Open Sans", 
    .color = "#333333",
    digits = 2,
    big.mark = "'", 
    na_str = "", nan_str = "",
    theme_fun = theme_booktabs)

‘tables’ comes with many options that can be used to format the table. The flextable transformation preserves column types, it makes easier to post format the table with flextable syntax if needed:

as_flextable(tab) |> 
  colformat_double() |>
  theme_vanilla()

Use row separator

Groups’ separators can be defined as rows instead of a first column in order to reduce the width of the table:

as_flextable(tab, spread_first_col = TRUE) |> 
  colformat_double()

Enrich with flextable

Now let’s add more customizations to illustrate some other flextable features that fit well with tabular():

• row title formatting with as_paragraph(),
• content tabulation with prepend_chunks(as_chunk("\t")),
• labels update with labelizor().

ft <- as_flextable(tab, spread_first_col = TRUE,
    row_title = as_paragraph(
      colorize("species: ", color = "#8f2218"),
      colorize(as_b(.row_title), color = "#8f2218")
    )) |> 
  colformat_double() |>
  align(j = 1, align = "left") |>
  prepend_chunks(i = ~ .is_row_title %in% FALSE, j = 1, as_chunk("\t")) |>
  labelizor(part = "header", labels = c(bill_depth_mm = "bill length\n(millimeters)", 
    body_mass_g = "body mass\n(grams)", island = "Island\nin Palmer\nArchipelago",
    n = "Number\nof\npenguins")) |>
  labelizor(part = "body", labels = stringr::str_to_title) |>
  autofit()
ft

Add into a document

There are simple methods to export a flextable into a document:

save_as_docx(ft, path = "flextable-tabular.docx")
save_as_rtf(ft, path = "flextable-tabular.rtf")
save_as_html(ft, path = "flextable-tabular.html")
save_as_image(ft, path = "flextable-tabular.png")
save_as_pptx(ft, path = "flextable-tabular.pptx")

files can be downloaded here:

• flextable-tabular.docx
• flextable-tabular.html
• flextable-tabular.rtf
• flextable-tabular.png
• flextable-tabular.pptx