Often, all you need in a table is data as text and numbers. But sometimes, you’d like to visualize results in each row, too. That’s especially true when each row of data is a trend over time.
You can do that inside a new table column with mini inline graphs called sparklines. You might be familiar with them in Excel, but you can create them in interactive HTML tables, too—with the sparkline package and four basic steps:
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- Add a column in the data frame that has sparkline data and formatting.
- Add a snippet of JavaScript to the table options. That’s the same code all the time, so you can save it once and reuse it.
- This one is very easy: Add
escape = FALSEas adatatable()argument so HTML displays as HTML and not as the actual code. - This is also very easy: Pipe the results to a function that adds necessary dependencies so the table will display sparklines.
1. Add a column with sparkline data and formatting
Before adding sparklines to a table, you need a table. Here’s code to generate a table from a data frame called prices, including adding search filters and formatting one of the columns as percents:
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