Exporting Tablespan

Motivations for using tablespan

There are two primary motivations for using tablespan:

1. Easily create “good enough” tables that can be exported to many formats. tablespan is designed to quickly generate basic tables that work across a wide variety of outputs. This is ideal for internal or semi-formal reporting where the same table needs to be delivered as:

   • HTML (dashboards)
   • PDF, Word or PowerPoint (reports and presentations)
   • Excel (shared tables)

2. Easily build a good starting point table that can then be refined with more sophisticated packages (e.g., gt or flextable). tablespan provides a concise syntax for relatively basic tables with title, subtitle, header, row names, columns and footnotes. Once exported to one of the supported packages (e.g., gt), these tables can easily be refined to be publication ready.

Example: creating a tablespan object

library(tablespan)
library(dplyr)

data(mtcars)

summarized_table <- mtcars |>
  group_by(cyl, vs) |>
  summarise(
    N = n(),
    mean_hp = mean(hp),
    sd_hp = sd(hp),
    mean_wt = mean(wt),
    sd_wt = sd(wt),
    .groups = "drop")

tbl <- tablespan(
  data = summarized_table,
  formula = Cylinder:cyl + Engine:vs ~
    N +
    (`Horse Power` = Mean:mean_hp + SD:sd_hp) +
    (`Weight` = Mean:mean_wt + SD:sd_wt),
  title = "Motor Trend Car Road Tests",
  subtitle = "A table created with tablespan",
  footnote = "Data from the mtcars data set")

At this point, tbl is a Tablespan object that contains the complete logical definition of the table and can be exported or further styled.

Styling with tablespan

Before exporting, basic styling can be applied directly at the tablespan level.

tbl <- tbl |>
  style_column(
    columns = mean_hp, 
    text_color = "#FFFFFF",
    color_scale = c("#01016f" = NA, "#d8031c" = NA))

Exporting tables

Before exporting, keep the following points in mind:

1. The required backend packages must be installed tablespan delegates exporting to other packages. If a backend package is not installed, the corresponding export will not work (e.g., make sure that gt is installed to export to gt).

2. flextable and huxtable must be loaded For as_flextable() and as_huxtable() to work, the respective packages must be loaded.

Export to Excel (openxlsx)

To use the excel export, please make sure that openxlsx is installed.

wb <- as_excel(tbl)
# openxlsx::saveWorkbook(wb, "cars.xlsx", overwrite = TRUE)

Export to gt and further refinement

“The gt package in R is a powerful tool for creating elegant and customizable tables for data visualization and reporting. It offers a user-friendly way to design and style tables in RMarkdown documents and Shiny applications.”

https://r-graph-gallery.com/package/gt.html

To use the gt export, please make sure that gt is installed.

Supported export formats:

• HTML
• LaTeX
• RTF
• Word (.docx)

gt_tbl <- as_gt(tbl)
gt_tbl

gt_tbl <- gt_tbl |>
  gt::cols_align(
    align = "left",
    columns = 1:2)

gt_tbl

Export to flextable

“The flextable package provides a framework to easily create tables for reporting and publications. Functions are provided to let users create tables, modify and format their content, and define their content.”

https://ardata-fr.github.io/flextable-book/

To use the flextabe export, please make sure that flextable is installed and loaded.

ft <- flextable::as_flextable(tbl)
ft

compose(ft,
  j = 5,
  value = flextable::as_paragraph(
    flextable::minibar(value = sd_hp, 
    max = max(sd_hp, na.rm = TRUE))),
  part = "body")

Export to huxtable

“Huxtable is an R package to create LaTeX and HTML tables, with a friendly, modern interface. Features include control over text styling, number format, background color, borders, padding and alignment. Cells can span multiple rows and/or columns. Tables can be manipulated with standard R subsetting or dplyr functions.”

https://hughjonesd.github.io/huxtable/

To use the huxtable export, please make sure that huxtable is installed and loaded.

ht <- huxtable::as_huxtable(tbl)
ht

ht <- huxtable::set_background_color(ht, row = 5:9, value = "orange")
ht