If your data.frame is entirely numeric, then you could design a print function that builds on this example of converting it to a data.matrix: mydf <- data.frame(Mon=1:3, Tue=4:6, Wed=7:9, Thu=10:12, Fri=13:15) mydm <- data.matrix(mydf) names(dimnames(mydm)) <- c("", "Weekdays") mydm data.frame(mydm) ## loses names(dimnames)