Knitr & Rmarkdown docx tables

Question

When using knitr and rmarkdown together to create a word document you can use an existing document to style the output.

For example in my y

Answer 1

I was able to get my word output to use a default table style that I defined in a reference .docx.

Instead of 'TableNormal', the table style it defaulted to was 'Table'.

I discovered this by knitting an rmarkdown with a kable.

---
date: "December 1, 2017"
output: 
  word_document:
    reference_docx: Template.docx
---
`r knitr::kable(source)`

Then I took a look at that generated document's XML to see what style it had defaulted to.

require(XML)

docx.file <- "generated_doc.docx"

## unzip the docx converted by Pandoc
system(paste("unzip", docx.file, "-d temp_dir"))
document.xml <- "temp_dir/word/document.xml"

doc <- xmlParse(document.xml)
tblStyle <- getNodeSet(xmlRoot(doc), "//w:tblStyle")

tblStyle

I defined the 'Table' style to put some color and borders in the reference docx. This works for one standard table style throughout the document, I haven't found a way to use different styles throughout.

This stayed true even after I opened the reference doc and edited it.