[R] Transfer Crosstable to Word-Document

[David Scott]

On Sat, 16 Feb 2008, Alan Zaslavsky wrote:

>
> If you want to get nicely formatted tables in Word and are familiar with
> Office tools (I know it's the Evil Empire but some of us work there), I
> suggest that you use Excel for formatting and then insert the table into
> your Word document.  IMHO, Excel is much superior to Word for table
> formatting, e.g. modifying number of significant digits, playing around
> with fonts and number formats, etc.  And when you have gotten the formats
> right you can paste in modified values of the numbers in the table without
> having to do the formatting again.  Including the table in your Word
> document is easy by cut-paste or creating a live link.
>
> As a user of R under Unix I haven't looked into the facilities for writing
> tables to Excel under Windows but there is something there.  Alternatively
> you can write a fixed-column or tab-delimited file and easily import to
> Excel.
>

Production of tables and formatting them in Word is something I have dealt 
with a couple of times recently and it really is important to do something 
smart because of the time taken to individually format tables.

An approach I used recently was to produce a text table in R and export it 
to Excel as a .csv file which could then be copied as is to Word. Borders 
and the like would still have to be formatted individually but not entries 
in the table (with a minor caveat below). The tables comprised results of 
test with p-values and confidence intervals etc for various variables.

To produce the entries in the table I wrote a small function which pasted 
bits of output together and formatted numbers exactly using formatC. Often 
the function produced a number of cells at one time.

One difficulty I had was Excel deciding as usual that it knew better than 
I did what I wanted. So when I had a cell with a p-value in brackets, that 
was of course a negative number for example. My solution was to prepend a 
' character which make Excel treat the following characters literally. 
Once the table has been put in Word a simple search and replace can remove 
the ' characters.

Overall, I was reasonably happy with the approach I took. If I have a 
future need I will have some ready-made functions to work from which will 
make life easier. I will be interested to try some of the other 
suggestions in this thread.

David Scott

_________________________________________________________________
David Scott	Department of Statistics, Tamaki Campus
 		The University of Auckland, PB 92019
 		Auckland 1142,    NEW ZEALAND
Phone: +64 9 373 7599 ext 86830		Fax: +64 9 373 7000
Email:	d.scott at auckland.ac.nz

Graduate Officer, Department of Statistics
Director of Consulting, Department of Statistics