Creating 'pretty' tables using RMarkdown

Obviously R is capable of outputting data in various formats. The default method is functional but not ‘pretty’:

dt <- mtcars[1:5, 1:6]
dt

##                    mpg cyl disp  hp drat    wt
## Mazda RX4         21.0   6  160 110 3.90 2.620
## Mazda RX4 Wag     21.0   6  160 110 3.90 2.875
## Datsun 710        22.8   4  108  93 3.85 2.320
## Hornet 4 Drive    21.4   6  258 110 3.08 3.215
## Hornet Sportabout 18.7   8  360 175 3.15 3.440

Now what happens if we use the kable() function from knitr:

kable(dt)

That’s looking better but we can provide more parameters to tweak the output:

dt %>% 
  kable("html", caption = 'This is a table with a caption', digits = 2, align = 'c') %>% 
  kable_styling(font_size = 14)

<style type="text/css">
th {
  background-color:#b1b1b1;
  border-top:1px solid black;
  border-bottom:1px solid black;
  padding:12px;}

td{
  background-color:#e7e7e7;
    border-bottom:1px dotted black;
    padding:2px;}

table{ 
  border-collapse:collapse;
    margin:10px 150px
    border: 1px solid black;}
</style>