Constructing Tabular Output Using the Graphics Device (the R Package Tabular)

• Activity Number: 312
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Tuesday, August 2, 2011 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: Section for Statistical Programmers and Analysts
• Author(s): Carlin Brickner*+ and Rocco Napoli
• Companies: The Visiting Nurse Service of New York and The Visiting Nurse Service of New York
• Keywords: R ; Tabular Output ; Reproducible Research

Abstract

Statisticians are often called upon to produce tabular output for papers and presentations. Clients expect a certain quality of output that does not match the default tabular output from statistical software. Various time-consuming, non-reproducible, error prone or manual methods (copy/paste/export to spreadsheet applications, custom programming, etc.) are often used to "dress up" the output. The R package 'tabulaR' is a proposed solution to this problem. This package utilizes the object oriented language, and assumptions about the structure of tabular data to drive the presentation of a table completely within the R environment. "Dress up" features are accessible through a user friendly interface familiar to the R programmer, as well as all of the file formats available for export via the R graphics device. These features include: text markup, formatting to grouped row and column label hierarchies, column and row dividers, conditional highlighting, footnotes, footer/header, and page overflow management.