rtabulator

rtabulator provides R bindings for Tabulator JS.

The goal of rtabulator is to make it easy to create elegant and interactive tables in markdown documents and Shiny applications. Furthermore, it supports creating spreadsheets with multiple sheets.

library(rtabulator)

Basic usage

To render a table just pass a data frame to tabulator():

tabulator(airquality)

In this case, the column definitions are automatically created for you. The horizontal alignment for character columns is set to left while numeric columns are aligned right.

It is also possible to pass a data URL:

data_url <- "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/eodaGmbH/rtabulator/main/data-raw/titanic.csv"

tabulator(
  data_url,
  col_select = c("PassengerId", "Name", "Pclass", "Fare", "Survived")
)

Setup options

With tabulator_options() you can customize your table (or spreadsheet):

setup <- tabulator_options(
  row_height = 50,
  selectable_rows = FALSE,
  edit_trigger_event = "click"
)

tabulator(iris, setup, editable = TRUE)

Pagination

setup <- tabulator_options(
  pagination = TRUE,
  pagination_size = 10,
  pagination_size_selector = c(10, 20, 50)
)

tabulator(USArrests, setup)

---

Note

If you prefer the pipe style, you can also use the helper function set_options_pagination().

---

Column formatters

To customize your columns, the easiest way is to use the set_formatter_*() functions:

tabulator(airquality) |>
  set_formatter_progress("Temp", legend = TRUE, legend_align = "left") |>
  set_formatter_traffic_light("Ozone") |>
  set_tooltip("Ozone")

With for_each_col() you can apply a formatter and any other function that updates the column settings to multiple columns:

numeric_cols <- c("Sepal_Length", "Sepal_Width", "Petal_Length", "Petal_Width")

tabulator(iris) |>
  for_each_col(
    numeric_cols,
    set_formatter_progress,
    legend = TRUE,
    legend_align = "left",
    min = 0,
    max = 10,
    color = c("yellow", "orange", "green")
  ) |>
  for_each_col(numeric_cols, set_tooltip)

Multi column headers

You can create multi column headers with set_multi_column_header():

headers <- list(
  Sepal = c("Sepal_Width", "Sepal_Length"),
  Petal = c("Petal_Width", "Petal_Length")
)

tabulator(iris) |>
  set_header_filter("Species", "list", placeholder = "Select Species") |>
  set_multi_column_header(headers)

---

Note

If further functions update the column definitions, set_multi_column_header() must be the last one. Therefore, in the example above set_header_filter() is called before we set the multi column header.

---

Groupings

setup <- tabulator_options(
  group_by = c("Pclass"),
  group_start_open = FALSE,
  group_toggle_element = "header"
)

titanic_df <- titanic(c("Pclass", "Sex", "Age", "Survived"))

tabulator(titanic_df, setup) |>
  set_formatter_traffic_light("Survived", color = c("red", "green"))

Multi level grouping is done by passing a vector as group_by parameter:

setup <- tabulator_options(
  group_by = c("Sex", "Pclass"),
  group_start_open = c(TRUE, FALSE)
)

tabulator(titanic_df, setup)

---

Note

You can also use set_options_group_by() to set the group by options.

---

Calculations

With set_calculation() you can add calculations to the top or bottom of columns:

tabulator(iris[4:5]) |>
  set_calculation("Petal_Width", "avg", pos = "top") |>
  set_calculation("Petal_Width", "max", precision = 1, pos = "bottom")

Editors

Set editable = TRUE to make all columns of the table editable. In this case, the editor for numeric columns is set to number and all others to input.

setup <- tabulator_options(edit_trigger_event = "click")

tabulator(iris, setup, editable = TRUE)

To customize editor settings and validate user input use set_editor():

tabulator(iris[, c(2, 5)], setup) |>
  set_editor(
    column = "Species",
    editor = "list",
    values_lookup = "active",
    clearable = TRUE,
    autocomplete = TRUE
  ) |>
  set_editor(
    column = "Sepal_Width",
    editor = "number",
    min = 0,
    max = 10,
    step = 0.1,
    validator = c("min:0", "max:10")
  )

Spreadsheets

To create an empty spreadsheet just pass an empty list as data parameter and spreadsheet = TRUE to tabulator():

tabulator(data = list(), spreadsheet = TRUE)

The data format for spreadsheets is a list of lists or vectors where each entry represents a row in the spreadsheet:

spreadsheet_data <- list(
  c(1, 2, 3),
  c(2, 3, 4)
)

To use multiple sheets pass a list of sheets created withspreadsheet_def(). In this case, data is passed with the data parameter of the sheet definitions:

sheets <- list(
  spreadsheet_def(title = "Lee", data = spreadsheet_data),
  spreadsheet_def(title = "Morgan", data = list()) # Empty spreadsheet
)
setup <- tabulator_options(
  spreadsheet = TRUE,
  spreadsheet_sheets = sheets,
  spreadsheet_sheet_tabs = TRUE,
  edit_trigger_event = "click"
)

tabulator(NULL, setup)

Learn more

• Shiny integration: vignette("shiny")
• Themes: vignette("themes")
• Connecting tables: vignette("connected-tables")