On Sat, 16 Feb 2008, Alan Zaslavsky wrote:
>
> If you want to get nicely formatted tables in Word and are familiar with
> Office tools (I know it's the Evil Empire but some of us work there), I
> suggest that you use Excel for formatting and then insert the table into
> your Word document. IMHO, Excel is much superior to Word for table
> formatting, e.g. modifying number of significant digits, playing around
> with fonts and number formats, etc. And when you have gotten the formats
> right you can paste in modified values of the numbers in the table without
> having to do the formatting again. Including the table in your Word
> document is easy by cut-paste or creating a live link.
>
> As a user of R under Unix I haven't looked into the facilities for writing
> tables to Excel under Windows but there is something there. Alternatively
> you can write a fixed-column or tab-delimited file and easily import to
> Excel.
>
Production of tables and formatting them in Word is something I have dealt
with a couple of times recently and it really is important to do something
smart because of the time taken to individually format tables.
An approach I used recently was to produce a text table in R and export it
to Excel as a .csv file which could then be copied as is to Word. Borders
and the like would still have to be formatted individually but not entries
in the table (with a minor caveat below). The tables comprised results of
test with p-values and confidence intervals etc for various variables.
To produce the entries in the table I wrote a small function which pasted
bits of output together and formatted numbers exactly using formatC. Often
the function produced a number of cells at one time.
One difficulty I had was Excel deciding as usual that it knew better than
I did what I wanted. So when I had a cell with a p-value in brackets, that
was of course a negative number for example. My solution was to prepend a
' character which make Excel treat the following characters literally.
Once the table has been put in Word a simple search and replace can remove
the ' characters.
Overall, I was reasonably happy with the approach I took. If I have a
future need I will have some ready-made functions to work from which will
make life easier. I will be interested to try some of the other
suggestions in this thread.
David Scott
_________________________________________________________________
David Scott Department of Statistics, Tamaki Campus
The University of Auckland, PB 92019
Auckland 1142, NEW ZEALAND
Phone: +64 9 373 7599 ext 86830 Fax: +64 9 373 7000
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Graduate Officer, Department of Statistics
Director of Consulting, Department of Statistics
______________________________________________
R-help@r-project.org mailing list
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
