Exposing some formatting options...

[adamdsmith]

I regularly use openxlsx to generate spreadsheets for colleagues. These spreadsheets make use of such formatting options as: freeze panes, autofiltering, auto or manual column widths, and formatted dates and hyperlinks.

Would love to see these options in writexl.

For example...

library(openxlsx)
options("openxlsx.dateFormat" = "yyyy-mm-dd")

df <- data.frame(url = rep("https://ropensci.org/blog/technotes/2017/09/08/writexl-release", 5),
                 date = seq.Date(from = as.Date("2017-09-08"), by = 1, length.out = 5),
                 topic = paste("writexl package announced", 0:4, "days ago!"),
                 stringsAsFactors = FALSE)

class(df$url) <- "hyperlink"
wb <- createWorkbook()
urls <- which(names(df) == "url")
addWorksheet(wb, "test worksheet")

# Manual column widths
col_widths <- c(11, 10, 36)
setColWidths(wb, 1, cols = seq_along(df), widths = col_widths)

# Freeze panes
freezePane(wb, 1, firstRow = TRUE)

# Write and add autofilter
writeData(wb, 1, df, withFilter = TRUE)

# Change hyperlink display text
writeData(wb, sheet = 1, x = rep("this is a link", nrow(df)),
          startRow = 2, startCol = urls)

# Save output
saveWorkbook(wb, "C:/temp/test.xlsx")

[stephLH]

+1 ! I especially use the setColWidths function in openxlsx to auto-adjust colum width.

[ThoDuyNguyen]

some basic formatting for table header would be nice, just like as params asTable of openxlsx.write.xlsx

[rdatasculptor]

@jeroen, any plans in adding some formatting options? I agree with @stephLH on his remark about setColWidths function that auto-adjusts column width. Writexl really is a great package that does it's job very easily. My colleagues like it when I use it to make data available in excel. However, their first impression would be much more positive if the column width would be automatically set right. The adjustment of the column width is the first thing really every user, including myself, does manually after opening the generated Excel file. Always. It's the first thing that is needed for eveyone to make the data readable. So I was just wondering :-)

[superkeyor]

Personally, I would like to have autofilter options added 👍 :)

[StephieLaPugh]

Agree with all of the above! Great package so far; these things would make it even better.

P.S. Death to clippy.

[katrinleinweber]

+1 for freezePane :-)

[nr0cinu]

+1 for freeze panes too! Would also be nice to format the columns differently :)

[jcbannon]

Love the package, but auto column widths would be great.

[gitnirajky]

Currently Format header format_headers = TRUE allows to have col_names in the xlsx centered and bold. Can we have option to keep them aligned on left but bold or as needed. It does not make sense for to rows align to left but header to center, what we still want to keep is bold headers. Some users complains because center aligned headers are not properly readable without adjusting width. Hope this make sense.

[jmcnamara]

From a libxlsxwriter point of view the feasibility/difficulty of the formatting features requested above is:

1. openxlsx.dateFormat. Relatively easy. This can be done with the existing writexl code.
2. Manual column widths col_widths <- c(11, 10, 36): Relatively easy in libxlsxwriter. However, autofit columns aren't currently supported since it isn't part of the file format and would have to be simulated.
3. Freeze panes freezePane(wb, 1, firstRow = TRUE): This is pretty straightforward in libxlsxwriter.
4. Write and add autofilter writeData(wb, 1, df, withFilter = TRUE). This is also relatively straightforward.
5. asTable: Tables aren't supported in libxlsxwriter yet (but are supported in xlsxwriter like this Pandas example ). It should be available in the next few months. Update: it is available now.
6. Header formatting. Relatively easy. This can be done mainly with the existing writexl code.

If there is interest I could try implement examples of most of these, apart from number 5 (for now).

[jeroen]

I'm worried that formatting is a rabbit hole that will introduce a lot of complexity that I don't have time to review or maintain. The primary goal of writexl is to be simple, fast and reliable to make R data accessible to excel users. Formatting is beyond the scope of what I had in mind.

If there is some low hanging fruit that is trivial to implement, and widely useful, we could add it, but I am very worried of feature creep when we start adding all the one-off formatting feature requests.

[samkulu]

Could a pre-formatted template be the solution? Unfortunately, I don't know how intertwined the formatting is with the data in the zip file. But maybe there is somehow a possibility to use the XML Source or maybe an option with SourceData. See Overview of XML in Excel

[rix133]

I understand that introducing this complexity might be something the maintainer does not want to incorporate. So anybody really needing this can use my fork to introduce some of this behavior:

if (!require(devtools)) {
  install.packages("devtools")
}

# Install the writexl package from the forked GitHub repository
devtools::install_github("rix133/writexl")