mschart R package

The mschart package provides a framework for easily creating charts for ‘Microsoft PowerPoint’ presentations, ‘Microsoft Word’ documents and ‘Microsoft Excel’ workbooks. It has to be used with package officer that will produce the charts in new or existing PowerPoint, Word or Excel files. With ‘Microsoft Charts’, the data is integrated into the document and linked to the chart. The result can be edited, annotated and resized. If the data is updated in the document, the chart is also updated.

Example

This is a basic example which shows you how to create a bar chart.

library(mschart)

sales <- data.frame(
  quarter = rep(c("Q1", "Q2", "Q3", "Q4"), each = 2),
  revenue = c(12, 9, 15, 11, 18, 14, 21, 17),
  region  = rep(c("EU", "US"), times = 4)
)

bars <- ms_barchart(
  data = sales, x = "quarter", y = "revenue", group = "region"
)

Then use package officer to send the object as a chart.

library(officer)
doc <- read_pptx()
doc <- add_slide(doc, layout = "Title and Content", master = "Office Theme")
doc <- ph_with(doc, value = bars, location = ph_location_fullsize())

print(doc, target = "example.pptx")

The same chart object can be dropped into an Excel sheet with officer::sheet_add_drawing(). By default the chart’s underlying data is written next to the chart automatically.

You can also write the data first with officer::sheet_write_data() and ask the chart to reuse it by passing write_data = FALSE. This is useful when the data should appear at a specific position, or when several charts share the same dataset:

wb <- read_xlsx()
wb <- add_sheet(wb, label = "sales")

# 1. Write the data on the sheet at the desired position.
wb <- sheet_write_data(wb, sheet = "sales", value = bars$data_series,
                       start_col = 1, start_row = 1)

# 2. Add the chart and tell it to reference the data already in place.
wb <- sheet_add_drawing(wb, sheet = "sales", value = bars,
                        write_data = FALSE,
                        start_col = 1, start_row = 1,
                        left = 5, top = 0.5, width = 6, height = 4)

print(wb, target = "example.xlsx")

At any moment, you can type print(your_chart, preview = TRUE) to preview the chart in a temporary PowerPoint file. This requires a PowerPoint Viewer to be installed on the machine.

Installation

You can get the development version from GitHub:

devtools::install_github("ardata-fr/mschart")

Or the latest version on CRAN:

install.packages("mschart")

Contributing to the package

Bug reports

When you file a bug report, please spend some time making it easy for me to follow and reproduce. The more time you spend on making the bug report coherent, the more time I can dedicate to investigating the bug as opposed to the bug report.