2 knitr

knitr package includes a handy kable() function that produces simple tables:

data(mtcars)
knitr::kable( head(mtcars))

	mpg	cyl	disp	hp	drat	wt	qsec	vs	am	gear	carb
Mazda RX4	21.0	6	160	110	3.90	2.620	16.46	0	1	4	4
Mazda RX4 Wag	21.0	6	160	110	3.90	2.875	17.02	0	1	4	4
Datsun 710	22.8	4	108	93	3.85	2.320	18.61	1	1	4	1
Hornet 4 Drive	21.4	6	258	110	3.08	3.215	19.44	1	0	3	1
Hornet Sportabout	18.7	8	360	175	3.15	3.440	17.02	0	0	3	2
Valiant	18.1	6	225	105	2.76	3.460	20.22	1	0	3	1

3 pander

pander package is a relatively simple to use package. It can produce well-formatted tables for the outputs of summary() function for the datasets and models:

library(pander)
pander( summary(mtcars[, 1:4]) )

mpg	cyl	disp	hp
Min. :10.40	Min. :4.000	Min. : 71.1	Min. : 52.0
1st Qu.:15.43	1st Qu.:4.000	1st Qu.:120.8	1st Qu.: 96.5
Median :19.20	Median :6.000	Median :196.3	Median :123.0
Mean :20.09	Mean :6.188	Mean :230.7	Mean :146.7
3rd Qu.:22.80	3rd Qu.:8.000	3rd Qu.:326.0	3rd Qu.:180.0
Max. :33.90	Max. :8.000	Max. :472.0	Max. :335.0

model <- lm( mpg ~ cyl, data=mtcars )    # a simple lenear regression
pander( summary(model) )

	Estimate	Std. Error	t value	Pr(>\|t\|)
(Intercept)	37.88	2.074	18.27	8.369e-18
cyl	-2.876	0.3224	-8.92	6.113e-10

Fitting linear model: mpg ~ cyl
Observations	Residual Std. Error	\(R^2\)	Adjusted \(R^2\)
32	3.206	0.7262	0.7171

4 DT

DT package can display matrices and data frames as tables and provides filtering and sorting. It is especially useful to display long tables that do not fit on a single page:

DT::datatable(data=mtcars)

5 kableExtra

kableExtra package extends functionality of the kable package.

library(kableExtra)
df <- mtcars[1:5, 1:6]

df %>%
  kbl()

	mpg	cyl	disp	hp	drat	wt
Mazda RX4	21.0	6	160	110	3.90	2.620
Mazda RX4 Wag	21.0	6	160	110	3.90	2.875
Datsun 710	22.8	4	108	93	3.85	2.320
Hornet 4 Drive	21.4	6	258	110	3.08	3.215
Hornet Sportabout	18.7	8	360	175	3.15	3.440

This package has a few themes:

kable_paper(“hover”, full_width = F)
kable_classic(full_width = F, html_font = “Cambria”)
kable_classic_2(full_width = F)
kable_minimal()
kable_material(c(“striped”, “hover”))
kable_material_dark()

df %>%
  kbl() %>%
  kable_classic()

	mpg	cyl	disp	hp	drat	wt
Mazda RX4	21.0	6	160	110	3.90	2.620
Mazda RX4 Wag	21.0	6	160	110	3.90	2.875
Datsun 710	22.8	4	108	93	3.85	2.320
Hornet 4 Drive	21.4	6	258	110	3.08	3.215
Hornet Sportabout	18.7	8	360	175	3.15	3.440

5.1 kable_styling

Function kable_styling() allows other ways to customize the output table:

df %>%
  kbl() %>%
  kable_styling(bootstrap_options = c("striped", "hover", "condensed"))

	mpg	cyl	disp	hp	drat	wt
Mazda RX4	21.0	6	160	110	3.90	2.620
Mazda RX4 Wag	21.0	6	160	110	3.90	2.875
Datsun 710	22.8	4	108	93	3.85	2.320
Hornet 4 Drive	21.4	6	258	110	3.08	3.215
Hornet Sportabout	18.7	8	360	175	3.15	3.440

kable_styling() includes the following options:

full_width - TRUE or FALSE (default - TRUE)
position - “left”, “center”, “right”, “float_left”, “float_right”
font_size - a numeric value
fixed_thead - T or F (option to fix the header row on top)

5.2 Column_spec

This function can be used to format specific columns, e.g:

df %>%
  kbl() %>%
  kable_minimal() %>%
  column_spec(1, bold = T) %>%
  column_spec(2, background="lightyellow")

	mpg	cyl	disp	hp	drat	wt
Mazda RX4	21.0	6	160	110	3.90	2.620
Mazda RX4 Wag	21.0	6	160	110	3.90	2.875
Datsun 710	22.8	4	108	93	3.85	2.320
Hornet 4 Drive	21.4	6	258	110	3.08	3.215
Hornet Sportabout	18.7	8	360	175	3.15	3.440

We can also use a conditional formatting for the values in a column based on a value of another variable:

df %>%
  kbl() %>%
  kable_minimal() %>%
  column_spec(1, bold = T) %>%
  column_spec(5, color=ifelse(df$hp==110, "red", "black"))

	mpg	cyl	disp	hp	drat	wt
Mazda RX4	21.0	6	160	110	3.90	2.620
Mazda RX4 Wag	21.0	6	160	110	3.90	2.875
Datsun 710	22.8	4	108	93	3.85	2.320
Hornet 4 Drive	21.4	6	258	110	3.08	3.215
Hornet Sportabout	18.7	8	360	175	3.15	3.440

5.3 Row_spec

Similar to column_spec, we can use row_spec() function to format rows:

df %>%
  kbl() %>%
  kable_paper(full_width = F) %>%
  column_spec(1, bold = T) %>%
  row_spec(3, background="brown", color="white", bold = TRUE)

	mpg	cyl	disp	hp	drat	wt
Mazda RX4	21.0	6	160	110	3.90	2.620
Mazda RX4 Wag	21.0	6	160	110	3.90	2.875
Datsun 710	22.8	4	108	93	3.85	2.320
Hornet 4 Drive	21.4	6	258	110	3.08	3.215
Hornet Sportabout	18.7	8	360	175	3.15	3.440

5.4 Sparklines

We can include inline plots into this table. The following types of plots are available:

spec_hist
spec_boxplot
spec_plot

First let’s prepare the data:

(mpg_list <- split(mtcars$mpg, mtcars$cyl))

$`4`
 [1] 22.8 24.4 22.8 32.4 30.4 33.9 21.5 27.3 26.0 30.4 21.4

$`6`
[1] 21.0 21.0 21.4 18.1 19.2 17.8 19.7

$`8`
 [1] 18.7 14.3 16.4 17.3 15.2 10.4 10.4 14.7 15.5 15.2 13.3 19.2 15.8 15.0

Then we need to define a table with the desired number of rows and columns and give columns names:

df_plot <- data.frame(cyl = c(4, 6, 8), 
                      mpg_box = "", 
                      mpg_hist = "",
                      min = unname(sapply(mpg_list, min)), 
                      max = unname(sapply(mpg_list, max)),
                      mean = unname(sapply(mpg_list, mean)))

Now we can add the plots into the first two columns:

df_plot  %>%
  kbl(booktabs = TRUE) %>%
  kable_paper(full_width = FALSE) %>%
  column_spec(2, image = spec_boxplot(mpg_list)) %>%
  column_spec(3, image = spec_hist(mpg_list))

cyl	min	max	mean
4	21.4	33.9	26.66364
6	17.8	21.4	19.74286
8	10.4	19.2	15.10000

For more examples see Create Awesome HTML Table with knitr::kable and kableExtra