Rstudio Table Contest Submission

And impressions of the {gt} package.

is is going to be a pretty short post. After seeing the Rstudio Table Contest announced a few weeks ago, I decided that I wanted to submit something to give myself more of a reason to practice with the {gt} package. I (somewhat arbitrarily) chose to use some longitudinal Broadway data posted earlier in the year as part of #TidyTuesday that I thought would lend itself well to a table.

Anyway, below is my submission to the contest, and below that are some initial impressions of the {gt} package (tl;dr – it’s pretty awesome).

Table

Top Earning Broadway Shows
through 2019
Rank	Show		Premiere Year	Total Earnings	Avg Theater Capacity Filled	Tickets Sold Per Year
						Average	1987 - 2019
1	The Lion King		1997	$1.66B	97.7%	676,795
2	Wicked		2003	$1.35B	97.2%	708,412
3	The Phantom of the Opera		1988	$1.24B	89.8%	600,508
4	Chicago		1996	$673.91M	82.7%	392,534
5	The Book of Mormon		2011	$647.07M	102.4%	445,435
6	Mamma Mia!		2001	$624.39M	89.7%	504,408
7	Hamilton		2015	$620.60M	101.7%	498,052
8	Jersey Boys		2005	$557.51M	89.5%	395,571
9	Les Miserables		1987	$548.80M	88.5%	353,014
10	Aladdin		2014	$447.72M	98.0%	686,539
Data: Playbill | Table: Eric Ekholm (@ekholm_e)

Impressions

Right, so, my overall impression of {gt} is that it’s an amazing package for building stylized static tables that fills a gap in R’s table ecosystem (to the extent that’s a thing). In my day job, I often find myself having to build tables either 1) as part of documents I’m creating on my own or 2) as stand-alone pieces that end up getting dropped into Powerpoints other people are putting together, and I’m excited about incorporating {gt} into my workflow for both of those types of tasks. Some more specific impressions of {gt}:

• It feels a lot like {ggtplot2}. This isn’t surprising, given that the intent of the package is to provide a “grammar of tables.” But the flow & general process felt very familiar to me even though I haven’t used it extensively before, and I imagine anyone else who’s reasonably proficient using ggplot will feel the same when picking up gt. Which is a big plus, because it mitigates a lot of that difficulty of learning a new package.
• It’s refreshingly easy to work with fonts. My biggest sore spot with ggplot is incorporating different fonts, which I always seem to struggle with (and my understanding is that this is a common struggle for Windows users). The {ragg} package seems to have made using fonts in ggplot easier, though. That said, using any Google font in gt is as easy as dropping in the google_font() function and voila, it works! Such a nice change of pace after my typical long troubleshooting sessions with fonts in ggplot.
• The ability to include ggplot images and web images in a table is pretty cool. You’ll see that I added both to my table above, and each felt very easy to include. Honestly, the most time-consuming part was finding the urls for the playbill images.
• The helper functions to format numbers, percents, and currency are great. I work with a lot of large $ amounts – as well as percents – in my job, and I’m super stoked about not having to manually format these anymore.
• I may have run into a small bug passing where font types (e.g. Lobster, Rubik) weren’t being recognized when called from within a list in the tab_style() function, which I’ll open an issue for. I found a workaround, but it involved essentially stylizing the same element multiple times, which doesn’t feel ideal.

Overall, {gt} is a really awesome package – huge thanks to the team at Rstudio for putting it together and maintaining it!