Creating LaTeX tables

If you aren't using LaTeX for reports, then you should be. Other than beautiful equation type-setting and layout flexibility, you can automatically turn data tables in R (or matrices, to be exact) into latex tables using the latex.table function in the quantreg library.

Let's say we want to create a table of means and standard deviations for the sepal length and width variables in Fisher's class iris data set.

library(quantreg)
data(iris)
my.table <- rbind(
     c(mean(iris$Sepal.Length), mean(iris$Sepal.Width)),
     c(sd(iris$Sepal.Length), sd(iris$Sepal.Width)))
colnames(my.table) <- c('Sepal Length', 'Sepal Width')
rownames(my.table) <- c('Mean', 'SD')
my.table

my.table now looks like:

     Sepal Length Sepal Width
Mean    5.8433333   3.0573333
SD      0.8280661   0.4358663

And now the magic:

latex.table(my.table, file="iris", rowlabel="", caption="Mean and SD of Iris data")

This will write a file called iris.tex in your current working directory. You can "include(iris)" in your latex source, or just copy and paste the LaTeX code in iris.tex into your source document.