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flextable is an R package that provides a grammar for creating and customizing beautiful tables for reporting and publication. With a single, consistent API you can produce tables for any output format — HTML, PDF, Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, RTF, or R grid graphics.

Quickstart

Create your first flextable in minutes

Installation

Install from CRAN or GitHub

Core Concepts

Understand how flextable works

API Reference

Browse the full function reference

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Why flextable?

Most R table packages are tied to a single output format. flextable solves this by providing one API for all formats — the same code that creates your HTML report table also generates your Word document table.

Multi-format

HTML, PDF, Word, PowerPoint, RTF, and R graphics — all from the same code

Fully customizable

Control every cell’s text, borders, colors, fonts, and alignment

R Markdown & Quarto

First-class integration with knitr chunk options

Statistical summaries

Built-in functions for model tables and cross-tabulations

Rich cell content

Embed images, equations, mini-charts, and ggplot2 plots in cells

Composable

Chain formatting verbs with the pipe operator

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How it works

A flextable is built from a data.frame and consists of three parts: header, body, and footer. You apply formatting and layout transformations by chaining functions — similar to the dplyr or ggplot2 workflows familiar to R users. 
library(flextable)

flextable(head(mtcars)) |>
  bold(part = "header") |>
  color(color = "#2B5797", part = "header") |>
  theme_vanilla() |>
  autofit()

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Supported output formats

FormatFunctionIntegration
Microsoft Wordsave_as_docx()officer, R Markdown, Quarto
Microsoft PowerPointsave_as_pptx()officer, R Markdown, Quarto
HTMLsave_as_html()R Markdown, Quarto, htmltools
PDF / LaTeX(via knitr)R Markdown, Quarto
RTFsave_as_rtf()officer
PNG / SVGsave_as_image()webshot2, magick
R gridgen_grob()patchwork

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Resources