inserttable

inserttable

inserttable is an RStudio add-in facilitating insertion of nicely formatted tables in R markdown documents or plain R scripts.

Installation

You can install inserttable from GitHub with:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("lbusett/insert_table")

Usage

Upon installing, inserttable registers a new RStudio Addin (Insert Table) that can be used to easily insert a table in a Rmd document. To use it, open a Rmd or R document and select “Addins –> Insert Table”.

There are two main use modes:

Launch the addin with the cursor on a empty line

In this case, a GUI will open allowing you to select the desired output format ( kable, kableExtra, DT and rhandsontable are currently implemented), and to edit the content of the table. After clicking Done the Addin will add in the file the code needed to generate the table in a nice tribble format (thanks to Miles McBain’s datapasta package!) to allow easier additional editing, and also the code needed to render it with the selected output format using some default options, as can be seen below:

IMPORTANT NOTE: Not all output formats play well with knitting to PDF or Word!. kable works everywhere, while DT and rhandsontable work out of the box only if knitting to html. You can make them work on PDF and Word by adding always_allow_html: yes in the yaml header of the Rmd, and installing phantomjs using: webshot::install_phantomjs() (results are not that good, though).

A useful feature is that, for larger tables, you can also cut and paste content from a spreadsheet :

Obviously, rendering of the table can be tweaked further by changing/adding arguments of the rendering functions in the automatically generated code.

Launch the addin while selecting the name of a variable

In this case, the GUI allows you to select only the desired output format ( it is assumed that the variable you select corresponds to a data frame or similar object containing the data you wish to show as table). After clicking Done the Addin will add in the Rmd document the code needed to render the selected variable as a table with the selected output format. The code will be added at the first empty line below that containing the name of the selected variable.

IMPORTANT NOTE: inserttable will make no effort to guarantee that the variable you select is a data.frame. It is up to you to select a meaningful variable!

Usage from the console

You can also use (part of) inserttable functionality from the console by calling function insert_table().

> insert_table(tbl_name = "table_1", nrows = 4, ncols = 4, tbl_format = "DT")

The function will return to the console the code needed to create a empty table of the specified dimensions and render it with the selected format: