[R] How good is R at making publication quality tables?

Jim Lemon jim at bitwrit.com.au
Wed Mar 17 23:43:21 CET 2010


On 03/18/2010 01:51 AM, Paul Miller wrote:
> Hello Everyone,
>
> I have just started learning R and am in the process of figuring out what it can and can't do. I must say I am very impressed with R so far and am amazed that something this good can actually be free.
>
> Recently, I finished reading R for SAS and SPSS Users and have begun reading SAS and R and Data Manipulation with R. Based on what I've read in these books and elsewhere, I get the impression that R is very good at drawing high quality graphs but maybe not so good at creating nice looking tables of the sort I'm used to getting through SAS ODS.
>
> Am I right or wrong about this? If I am wrong, can anyone show me some examples of how R can be used to create really nice looking tables? I often make tables of adverse events in clinical trials that have n(%) values in the cells. I'd love to see an example that does a nice job of making that sort of table but would be happy to see any examples that someone might be willing to send to me.
>
Hi Paul,
While the latex option provides more flexibility in formatting, I use 
HTML listings from the prettyR package as the first step. For those who 
do not know that an HTML browser is needed to display them, modern OSs 
are smart enough to figure this out for them. All of the word processing 
packages that I use can directly import HTML documents, and the result 
has been good enough for any application so far. To see if this would be 
suitable, run the example for the delim.table function in the prettyR 
package, then open the "testglm.html" file with your favorite word 
processor.

Jim



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