Chapter 51 Mschart

Huaqing Fang

8/27/2021: Due to changes in the mschart package as well as the inclusion of commands that don’t work within the bookdown format, such as opening PowerPoint, all code chunks have been set to eval=FALSE.

51.1 Overview

The mschart package provides a framework for easily creating charts for ‘Microsoft PowerPoint’ documents. It has to be used with package officer that will produce the charts in new or existing PowerPoint or Word document

51.2 Setup

install the mschart package, first install devtools. Then use ‘devtools’ to install maschart from Github, as shown in the code below.

# install.packages("devtools")  ## install the package from github
# devtools::install_github("ardata-fr/mschart")

library(mschart)
library(officer)

Use the Iris Dataset

library(datasets)
data(iris)

51.3 Create a line chart from a given dataframe

ms_linechart(data, x, y, group = NULL) creates a ms_linechart object where data is a given dataframe, x is the column name of x, y is the column name of y and group is the column name used to split data into series.

chart_ax_x(), chart_ax_y(…) defines settings for x and y axis

Note: rotation should be between -360 and 360

Below are some commonly used parameters for num_fmt:
“0”: display the number with no decimal
“0.00”: display the number with two decimals
“0%%”: display as percentages
“mm-dd-yy”: display as date

linec <- mschart::ms_linechart(data = iris, x = "Sepal.Length",
                      y = "Sepal.Width", group = "Species")

linec <- mschart::chart_ax_y(linec, num_fmt = "0.00", rotation = -90)

51.4 Produce the chart in a PowerPoint

The officer package lets R users manipulate Word (.docx) and PowerPoint (*.pptx) documents. Therefore, we can use this package to send the object as a chart.

doc <- read_pptx() 

doc <- add_slide(doc, layout = "Title and Content", master = "Office Theme")

doc <- ph_with(doc, linec, location = ph_location(width = 4, height = 3, label = "hello"))

print(doc, target = "example.pptx") # print the new line chart into a target power point

To view it online: office web viewer

51.5 View the chart by opening the PowerPoint

browseURL("example.pptx") # use browseURL to open the target ppt

51.6 Bar chart and other available charts

Other than linechart, we can also plot bar graphs, scatter plots and area graphs by calling:
ms_barchart(…),
ms_areachart(…),
ms_scatterchart(…)

Note: read_pptx() opens a new powerpoint by default, to add graphs into an existing powerpoint, simply give the path of the existing document

barc <- mschart::ms_barchart(data = iris, x = "Sepal.Length",
                      y = "Sepal.Width", group = "Species")

barc <- mschart::chart_ax_y(barc, num_fmt = "0.00", rotation = -90)

doc <- read_pptx(path = "./example.pptx") 

doc <- add_slide(doc, layout = "Title and Content", master = "Office Theme")

doc <- ph_with(doc, barc, location = ph_location(width = 4, height = 3, label = "hello"))

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

To view it online: office web viewer

51.7 Write into a word document

simply use read_docx() and body_add_chart functions where the chart parameter can be any ms_chart object, that is one of [barchart, linechart, scatterchart, areachart]

doc <- read_docx() 

doc <- body_add_chart(doc, chart = barc, style = "Normal")

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

To view it online: office web viewer

51.8 Customize Charts

Charts are generated with default values. Options are available to change charts properties. Global chart settings can be specified with generic function chart_settings() The following stacks the bars for each group.

barc <- chart_settings(barc, grouping = "stacked", gap_width = 50, overlap = 100 )

Axis properties are available with functions chart_ax_x() and chart_ax_y()

barc <- chart_ax_x(barc, cross_between = 'between', 
  major_tick_mark = "in", minor_tick_mark = "none")
barc <- chart_ax_y(barc, num_fmt = "0.00", rotation = -90)

Titles (main title, axis labels) can be set with function chart_labels():

barc <- chart_labels(barc, title = "A main title", 
  xlab = "x axis title", ylab = "y axis title")

Series visual settings can be customized with functions:
chart_data_fill(),
chart_data_stroke(),
chart_data_size(),
chart_data_symbol(),
chart_data_line_width()
and chart_labels_text()

barc <- chart_data_fill(barc,
  values = c(setosa = "#003C63", versicolor = "#ED1F24", virginica = "#F2AA00") )
barc <- chart_data_stroke(barc, values = "transparent" )

doc <- read_docx() 

doc <- body_add_chart(doc, chart = barc, style = "Normal")

print(doc, target = "costumized.docx")

To view it online: office web viewer