flextable: Functions for Tabular Reporting

The flextable package facilitates access to and manipulation of tabular reporting elements from R.

The documentation of functions can be opened with command help(package = "flextable").

flextable() function is producing flexible tables where each cell can contain several chunks of text with their own set of formatting properties (bold, font color, etc.). Function mk_par() lets customise text of cells.

Each cell holds a single paragraph composed of inline chunks (see as_paragraph()). This means cell content is strictly inline: bold, italic, links, images, equations, inline code, etc. Block-level structures (multiple paragraphs, bullet lists, headings or fenced code blocks) cannot be placed inside a cell. Soft line breaks (\n) are however supported.

The as_flextable() function is used to transform specific objects into flextable objects. For example, you can transform a crosstab produced with the 'tables' package into a flextable which can then be formatted, annotated or augmented with footnotes.

In order to reduce the homogenization efforts and the number of functions to be called, it is recommended to define formatting properties such as font, border color, number of decimals displayed which will then be applied by default. See set_flextable_defaults() for more details.

Table Structure

A flextable is composed of three distinct parts:

header: By default, contains one row with the column names from the data.frame
body: Contains the actual data from the data.frame
footer: Empty by default, but can contain content (commonly used for footnotes or #' summary rows)

       HEADER         <- Column names, labels, spanning headers
--------------------
        BODY          <- Data rows
--------------------
       FOOTER         <- Summary rows, notes, footnotes (optional)

A basic flextable has:

in the part 'header': 1 row with column names
in the part 'body': as many rows as there are in the input data.frame
no footer

Rows and columns can be added or removed to the basic flextable:

Add new rows in header with add_header(), add_header_row(), add_header_lines() and set_header_labels().
Add new rows in footer with add_footer(), add_footer_lines(), set_header_footer_df() and add_footer_row().
Add new rows in body with add_body() and add_body_row().
Delete columns with delete_columns().
Delete a part with delete_part().
Use column names to separate a simple header row into multiple nested rows with separate_header().

Selectors in flextable

Selectors are a core feature of flextable that allow you to specify which parts (part), rows (i) and columns (j) should be affected by formatting, styling, or content operations. See the corresponding manual: <Selectors in flextable>.

Author

Maintainer: David Gohel david.gohel@ardata.fr

Authors:

Panagiotis Skintzos panagiotis.skintzos@ardata.fr

Other contributors:

ArData [copyright holder]
Clementine Jager [contributor]
Eli Daniels [contributor]
Quentin Fazilleau [contributor]
Maxim Nazarov [contributor]
Titouan Robert [contributor]
Michael Barrowman [contributor]
Atsushi Yasumoto [contributor]
Paul Julian [contributor]
Sean Browning [contributor]
Rémi Thériault (ORCID) [contributor]
Samuel Jobert [contributor]
Keith Newman [contributor]

Table Structure

Selectors in flextable

See also

Author