Data frame to word table?

Question

Is there a way to easily turn a data frame into a Word table via rmarkdown?

If I use rmarkdown in RStudio to create a Word document I get a nicely printed table but

Answer 1

You can use the rmarkdown and knitr packages. Here is an example function, where df is the data.frame, output_file is the output file name and output_dir the output folder. Extra named argument are sent to rmarkdown::render:

df2word <- function(df, output_file = "table.doc", output_dir = ".", ...) {
  f <- tempfile(fileext =".Rmd" )
  cat(file = f, '```{r, echo = FALSE}
                  knitr::kable(df)
                 ```', append = TRUE)
  rmarkdown::render(f, output_file = output_file, output_dir = output_dir, ...)
  unlink(f)
  file.path(output_dir, output_file)
}

out <- df2word(mtcars)
browseURL(out)

Of course you can adapt the code to be more flexible.

It is though flexible enough to allow you to extract other formats too, e.g. html:

out <- df2word(mtcars, output_file = "table.html")
browseURL(out)

or pdf:

out <- df2word(mtcars, output_file = "table.pdf", output_format = rmarkdown::pdf_document())
browseURL(out)