Quick and pretty frequency tables with ivo_table

Background

R has some great packages for creating nice-looking tables. Packages like gt and flextable allow the user to create a wide range of tables, with lots of flexibility in how these are presented and formatted. The downside to these Swiss army knife-style packages is that simple tasks, like creating a frequency table, require a lot of typing. Enter ivo_table, a package for creating great-looking frequency tables and contingency tables without any hassle.

A first example

Let’s look at some examples using the penguins data from the palmerpenguins package. Say that we want to create a contingency table showing the counts of the categorical variables species, sex, and island. We can use ftable along with dplyr’s select:

library(dplyr)
#> 
#> Attaching package: 'dplyr'
#> The following objects are masked from 'package:stats':
#> 
#>     filter, lag
#> The following objects are masked from 'package:base':
#> 
#>     intersect, setdiff, setequal, union

library(palmerpenguins)

penguins |> select(species, sex, island) |> ftable()
#>                  island Biscoe Dream Torgersen
#> species   sex                                 
#> Adelie    female            22    27        24
#>           male              22    28        23
#> Chinstrap female             0    34         0
#>           male               0    34         0
#> Gentoo    female            58     0         0
#>           male              61     0         0

While informative, the formatting isn’t great, and it’s not something that we can easily export to a report or presentation.

ivo.table uses the same syntax, but with ivo_table instead of ftable:

library(ivo.table)

penguins |> select(species, sex, island) |> ivo_table()

The resulting table can easily be exported to a Word document:

penguins |>
  select(species, sex, island) |>
  ivo_table() |> 
  flextable::save_as_docx(path = "example_table.docx")

You can add row and column sums:

penguins |>
  select(species, sex, island) |>
  ivo_table(colsums = TRUE,
            rowsums = TRUE)

Or show percentages instead of counts, e.g. computed by column:

penguins |>
  select(species, sex, island) |>
  ivo_table(percent_by = "col")

Changing the appearance of your tables

ivo_table has lots of options for customising the look of your table. You can change the colours and fonts used, highlight columns, rows or cells, make columns bold, and more. Let’s look at some examples.

Change the font to Courier, use red instead of green, and make the names in the sex column bold:

penguins |>
  select(species, sex, island) |>
  ivo_table(color = "red",
            font_name = "Courier",
            bold_cols = 1)

Add a caption and highlight the cell on the fourth row of the third column:

penguins |>
  select(species, sex, island) |>
  ivo_table(caption = "A table with penguins in it",
            highlight_cols = 3,
            highlight_rows = 4)

ivo_table returns a flextable object, meaning that all functions used to style flextables can be used. For instance, you can change the font size used in different parts of the table using flextable::fontsize and change the background colour using flextable::bg:

penguins |>
  select(species, sex, island) |>
  ivo_table(color = "darkblue") |> 
  flextable::fontsize(size = 8, part = "body") |> 
  flextable::fontsize(size = 12, part = "header") |> 
  flextable::bg(bg = "pink", part = "all")