This is how a table should look

Like it says, this is *not* how a table should look!

It seems to me the only purpose of using RMarkdown is to make nice looking reports from data (and don’t get me wrong, that’s EXTREMELY IMPORTANT – what good is data if it can’t be communicated). Graphics look nice, but sometimes you need to see a table.

Enter two things: kableExtra and LaTeX.

kableExtra is simple to use:

library(kableExtra)
knitr::kable(theTableToShow, "html") %>%
kable_styling(bootstrap_options = c("striped", "hover"))

Yeah, it’s that simple! And there are options, too.

However, using Greek letters is a tad (only a tad) more difficult:

row.names(okisum) = c("Region", "$\\sum Volume$", "$\\sum AADT$", "$\\Delta$", "Pct", "$r^2$")

The “$\sum” refers to the symbols listed on this page (and there’s more, just do a web search for LaTeX Math Symbols and there’s hundreds of guides on what is available).  The one change is the extra backslash needed in R to escape the text.

The last part is the text formatting. I did this with the r format command:

format(round(as.numeric(table$AADT), 0), nsmall=0, big.mark=",")
paste(format(round(as.numeric(100 * table$Pct), 2), nsmall=0, big.mark=","), "%", sep="")

Note that this needs to be the last step, since the output of format is text. The first line rounds to no decimal points and adds a comma. The second line rounds 100*percentage to 2 decimal points and pastes a percent sign after it with no separator.

While this may seem menial, I’ve heard of many stories where management/leaders/etc didn’t want to believe something scrawled on a piece of paper, but when the same information was printed nicely on greenbar dot matrix paper, it was accepted as excellent work.

Posted on Wednesday, February 7th, 2018 By Andrew Rohne Comments are closed.