rpivotTable: pivottable for R

The rpivotTable package is an R htmlwidget visualization library built around the Javascript pivottable library.

PivotTable.js is a Javascript Pivot Table library with drag’n’drop functionality built on top of jQuery/jQueryUI and written in CoffeeScript (then compiled to JavaScript) by Nicolas Kruchten at Datacratic. It is available under an MIT license

Installation

The rpivotTable package depends on htmlwidgets package so you need to install both packages. You can do this using the devtools package as follows:

devtools::install_github(c("ramnathv/htmlwidgets", "smartinsightsfromdata/rpivotTable"))

Usage

Call the package with

library(rpivotTable)  # No need to explicitly load htmlwidgets: this is done automatically

Just plug in your data.frame or data.table (e.g. dt) to rpivotTable().

It is as simple as this:

data(mtcars)
rpivotTable(mtcars)

The pivot table should appear in your RStudio Viewer or your browser of choice.

Please refer to the examples and explanations here.

rpivotTable parameters decide how the pivot table will look like the firs time it is opened:

• data can be a data.frame or data.table. Nothing else is needed. If only the data is selected the pivot table opens with nothing on rows and columns (but you can at any time drag and drop any variable in rows or columns at your leasure)
• rows and cols allow the user to create a report, i.e. to indicate which element will be on rows and columns.
• aggregatorName indicates the type of aggregation. Options here are numerous: Count, Count Unique Values, List Unique Values, Sum, Integer Sum, Average, Sum over Sum, 80% Upper Bound, 80% Lower Bound, Sum as Fraction of Total, Sum as Fraction of Rows, Sum as Fraction of Columns, Count as Fraction of Total, Count as Fraction of Rows, Count as Fraction of Columns
• vals specifies the variable to use with aggregatorName.
• renderers dictates the type of graphic element used for display, like Table, Treemap etc.
• sorters allow to implement a javascript function to specify the ad hoc sorting of certain values. See vignette for an example. It is especially useful with time divisions like days of the week or months of the year (where the alphabetical order does not work)
• subtotals will allow to dynamically select / deselect subtotals

For example, to display a pivot table with frequency of colour combinations of eyes and hair, you can specify:

data(HairEyeColor)
rpivotTable(data = HairEyeColor, rows = "Hair",cols="Eye", vals = "Freq", aggregatorName = "Sum", rendererName = "Table", width="100%", height="400px")

This will display a cross tab with the frequency of eyes by hair colour. Dragging & dropping (slicing & dicing) categorical variables in rows and columns changes the shape of the table.

If you want to include it as part of your dplyr / magrittr pipeline, you can do that also:

library(dplyr)
iris %>%
  tbl_df() %>%
  filter( Sepal.Width > 3 ) %>%
  rpivotTable()

Latest news

I’m happy to announce that Nicolas Kruchten has officialy joined the rpivotTable project. Many thanks to him for the work on the current release.