Packages

For this post, we need to load the following library:

library(kableExtra)

Dataset

We create a simple dataset with 3 columns to showcase the color features of kableExtra

df = data.frame(Temp = c(1,2,3,4),
                Rain = c(12, 42, 17, 9),
                Hum = c(21, 24, 71, 90)
                )

Default kable table output

The kableExtra relies on the kable package and allows the use of the %>% (pipe) symbole. The main function is named kbl() and is similar to kable().

df %>%
  kbl() %>%
  kable_styling()

Temp	Rain	Hum
1	12	21
2	42	24
3	17	71
4	9	90

Change color of a row or column

The row_spec() and column_spec() functions have a color and background arguments that will change the colors, either of the background or the cell content.

df %>%
  kbl(align = "c") %>% # center the columns
  kable_styling(full_width = F) %>%
  column_spec(2, color = "red") %>%
  row_spec(3, color = "blue") %>%
  column_spec(1, background = "green") %>%
  row_spec(4, background = "yellow")

Temp	Rain	Hum
1	12	21
2	42	24
3	17	71
4	9	90

Use a list of colors

The color and background argument can also takes a vector of colors:

df %>%
  kbl(align = "c") %>% # center the columns
  kable_styling(full_width = F) %>%
  column_spec(3, background = c("blue", "red", "black", "blue"))

Temp	Rain	Hum
1	12	21
2	42	24
3	17	71
4	9	90

Gradient of color

In order to have a gradient of colors, we need to use the colorRampPalette() function in order to generate a vector of colors.

We also sort the dataframe with the Rain column so that the colors will be proportional to the values in this column.

# gradient color
colfunc = colorRampPalette(c("darkred", "magenta"))
n_color = nrow(df)
colors = colfunc(n_color) # generate nrow(df) (number of rows in df) colors, from darkred to magenta

df = df[order(df$Rain, decreasing = TRUE),] # sort (decreasing) by Rain values

df %>%
  kbl(align = "c") %>% # center the columns
  kable_styling(full_width = F) %>%
  column_spec(3, background = colors) %>%
  column_spec(2, color = colors)

	Temp	Rain	Hum
2	2	42	24
3	3	17	71
1	1	12	21
4	4	9	90

Conclusion

This post explained how to custom colors in a table using the kableExtra library. For more of this package, see the dedicated section or the table section.

Related chart types

Line plot

Area

Stacked area

Streamchart

Time Series

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