Easy frequency tables using {ivo.table}

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.

News in version 0.6

A new version of the ivo.table package is now available on CRAN. Updates include:

Improved formatting options.
A new vignette.

A short example

So what can you do with ivo.table?

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)
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()

		species
sex	island	Adelie	Chinstrap	Gentoo
female	Biscoe	22	0	58
	Dream	27	34	0
	Torgersen	24	0	0
male	Biscoe	22	0	61
	Dream	28	34	0
	Torgersen	23	0	0
(Missing)	Biscoe	0	0	5
	Dream	1	0	0
	Torgersen	5	0	0

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)

		species
sex	island	Adelie	Chinstrap	Gentoo	Total
female	Biscoe	22	0	58	80
	Dream	27	34	0	61
	Torgersen	24	0	0	24
male	Biscoe	22	0	61	83
	Dream	28	34	0	62
	Torgersen	23	0	0	23
(Missing)	Biscoe	0	0	5	5
	Dream	1	0	0	1
	Torgersen	5	0	0	5
Total		152	68	124	344

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

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

		species
sex	island	Adelie	Chinstrap	Gentoo
female	Biscoe	14,5 %	0,0 %	46,8 %
	Dream	17,8 %	50,0 %	0,0 %
	Torgersen	15,8 %	0,0 %	0,0 %
male	Biscoe	14,5 %	0,0 %	49,2 %
	Dream	18,4 %	50,0 %	0,0 %
	Torgersen	15,1 %	0,0 %	0,0 %
(Missing)	Biscoe	0,0 %	0,0 %	4,0 %
	Dream	0,7 %	0,0 %	0,0 %
	Torgersen	3,3 %	0,0 %	0,0 %

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)

		species
sex	island	Adelie	Chinstrap	Gentoo
female	Biscoe	22	0	58
	Dream	27	34	0
	Torgersen	24	0	0
male	Biscoe	22	0	61
	Dream	28	34	0
	Torgersen	23	0	0
(Missing)	Biscoe	0	0	5
	Dream	1	0	0
	Torgersen	5	0	0

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)

		species
sex	island	Adelie	Chinstrap	Gentoo
female	Biscoe	22	0	58
	Dream	27	34	0
	Torgersen	24	0	0
male	Biscoe	22	0	61
	Dream	28	34	0
	Torgersen	23	0	0
(Missing)	Biscoe	0	0	5
	Dream	1	0	0
	Torgersen	5	0	0

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")

		species
sex	island	Adelie	Chinstrap	Gentoo
female	Biscoe	22	0	58
	Dream	27	34	0
	Torgersen	24	0	0
male	Biscoe	22	0	61
	Dream	28	34	0
	Torgersen	23	0	0
(Missing)	Biscoe	0	0	5
	Dream	1	0	0
	Torgersen	5	0	0