Export Nicely-Formatted Data Frame in R (2 Examples)

In this R tutorial you’ll learn how to return a nicely-formatted data frame as PDF or txt file.

The article consists of this content:

Let’s do this!

Creation of Example Data

As a first step, let’s create some example data in R:

data <- data.frame(x1 = 1:5,    # Example data
                   x2 = LETTERS[1:5],
                   x3 = 3,
                   x4 = c("Hello", "What's up", "AAA", "x", "Y"))
data                            # Return data to console
#   x1 x2 x3        x4
# 1  1  A  3     Hello
# 2  2  B  3 What's up
# 3  3  C  3       AAA
# 4  4  D  3         x
# 5  5  E  3         Y

The previous output of the RStudio console shows the structure of our example data: It’s a data frame containing five rows and four columns.

Example 1: Print Data Frame as PDF-File Using gridExtra Package

In Example 1, I’ll illustrate how to return a data set as PDF file using the gridExtra package. If we want to use the functions of the gridExtra package, we first need to install and load gridExtra:

install.packages("gridExtra")   # Install & load gridExtra
library("gridExtra")

Now, we can save our example data in a publication ready design by using the grid.table function as shown below:

pdf("data_gridExtra.pdf")       # Export PDF
grid.table(data)
dev.off()

Figure 1 shows the output of the previous R syntax – A pretty data matrix printed to a PDF file.

Example 2: Print Data Frame as txt-File Using stargazer Package

This Example illustrates how to create a txt-file containing a nice looking data table. For this example, we are using the stargazer package:

install.packages("stargazer")   # Install & load gridExtra
library("stargazer")

Now, we can use the stargazer function to return our example data as txt:

stargazer(data,                 # Export txt
          summary = FALSE,
          type = "text",
          out = "data_stargazer_txt.txt")

Figure 2 illustrates how our txt file looks like.

Note that you can use the stargazer function to export many different file-types such as LaTeX code or HTML/CSS code. You simply need to change the type argument within the stargazer command accordingly.

Video, Further Resources & Summary

Some time ago I have released a video on my YouTube channel, which illustrates the R programming syntax of this post. You can find the video below.

Also, you could have a look at the related tutorials on my website:

• How to Export Data from R to Excel File
• Export CSV File without Row Names
• The R Programming Language

This page showed how to print a pretty data table to paper in the R programming language. If you have any additional questions, don’t hesitate to let me know in the comments section below.