Use groups instead of repetitive columns

This lesson is called Use groups instead of repetitive columns, part of the Making Beautiful Tables with R course. This lesson is called Use groups instead of repetitive columns, part of the Making Beautiful Tables with R course.

Transcript

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It’s better to use groups instead of repetitive columns. For instance, the island column repeats itself multiple times before we move on to the next island name. This is a doesn’t really look good. And it would be nice if we can just make it visually clearer that certain rows belong to certain islands.

The way to do that is to use groups. This means that we have rows (one for each island) that spans all of the columns. Here, we’ll transition to as_flextable() because I like hide_grouplabel. But I’ll show the flextable() version before that.

penguin_counts_wider |> 
  mutate(island = paste('Island: ', island)) |> 
  as_grouped_data(
    groups = 'island'
  ) |> 
  as_flextable(hide_grouplabel = TRUE) |> 
  set_header_labels(
    island = 'Island',
    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(1, 2, 2, 2)
  ) |> 
  add_header_lines(
    values = c('Penguins in the Palmer Archipelago', 'Data is courtesy of the {palmerpenguins} R package')
  ) |> 
  align(i = 3, align = 'center', part = 'header') |> 
  autofit()