Use better column names and a title

This lesson is called Use better column names and a title, part of the Making Beautiful Tables with R course. This lesson is called Use better column names and a title, part of the Making Beautiful Tables with R course.

Transcript

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Next up, we need to use better column names. That’s because flextable() prints a data frame as is. Consequently, column names may not really be human readable at all. For example, column names may contain underscores or some other kind of unusual notation.

While we’re at it, we should avoid duplicating a lot of column names. For example, in this example, we see that we always repeat the species name. To avoid that it’s best to add a novel row of so-called spanners. Furthermore, we should add one more important label, i.e. a title.

flextable(penguin_counts_wider) |> 
  set_header_labels(
    island = 'Island',
    year = 'Year',
    Adelie_female = 'Female',
    Adelie_male = 'Male',
    Chinstrap_female = 'Female',
    Chinstrap_male = 'Male',
    Gentoo_female = 'Female',
    Gentoo_male = 'Male'
  ) |> 
  add_header_row(
    values = c('', 'Adelie', 'Chinstrap', 'Gentoo'),
    colwidths = c(2, 2, 2, 2)
  ) |> 
  add_header_lines(
    values = c('Penguins in the Palmer Archipelago', 'Data is courtesy of the {palmerpenguins} R package')
  ) |> 
  autofit()

Alternative:

new_names <- c('Island', 'Year', rep(c('Female', 'Male'), 3))
names(new_names) <- colnames(penguin_counts_wider)

flextable(penguin_counts_wider) |> 
  set_header_labels(
    values = new_names
  ) |> 
  add_header_row(
    values = c('', 'Adelie', 'Chinstrap', 'Gentoo'),
    colwidths = c(2, 2, 2, 2)
  ) |> 
  add_header_lines(
    values = c('Penguins in the Palmer Archipelago', 'Data is courtesy of the {palmerpenguins} R package')
  ) |> 
  autofit()

Your Turn

Solution

Here are two ways to do this.

Approach #1

selected_countries |> 
  flextable() |> 
  set_header_labels(
    continent = '',
    country = '',
    year1957 = '1957',
    year1967 = '1967',
    year1977 = '1977',
    year1987 = '1987',
    year1997 = '1997',
    year2007 = '2007'
  ) |> 
  add_header_row(
    values = c('', '50s-70s', '80s-20s'),
    colwidths = c(2, 3, 3)
  ) |> 
  add_header_lines(
    values = c('Life expectancties over time', 'Data is courtesy of the {gapminder} R package')
  ) |> 
  autofit()

Approach #2

new_names <- c('', '', seq(1957, 2007, 10))
names(new_names) <- colnames(selected_countries)

selected_countries |> 
  flextable() |> 
  set_header_labels(values = new_names) |> 
  add_header_row(
    values = c('', '50s-70s', '80s-20s'),
    colwidths = c(2, 3, 3)
  ) |> 
  add_header_lines(
    values = c('Life expectancties over time', 'Data is courtesy of the {gapminder} R package')
  ) |> 
  autofit()