DT: When Tables are the Product

Basic Kable

Knitr’s kable() function is an excellent way to get nicely formatted tables into RMarkdown documents. It’s quick and easy to use, and is miles ahead of using print(). Here’s an example:

head(enrollSummary) %>% kable()

You’ll notice that I only sent the first 6 rows to kable, that’s because there are 1738 rows in the dataframe. This table also looks a little nicer than it will in a vanila RMarkdown html document because of Hugo adding some flair.

Premium Kable

As with most things in R, basic kable is nice but it’s not too hard to get a lot more with a little customization. The kableExtra package provides extra customization for kable. I use it so much that I have a short-hand function with the most standard features I use.

my_kable <- function(df){
  kable(df,"html", digits = 3) %>% 
    kable_styling( bootstrap_options = 
          c("striped", "hover","condensed", "responsive"), full_width=FALSE) 
}

head(enrollSummary) %>% my_kable()

This makes tables not span the entire page by default and adds some basic readability features. It’s definitely an improvement over kable alone for almost any table. Look into the kableExtra documentation because there’s a lot more that can be done such as coloring cells based on contents that can help add emphasis to data.

One additional improvement is the easy of wrapping the table in a scroll box:

enrollSummary %>% my_kable() %>% scroll_box(width = "85%", height = "350px")