Obtaining a Flat Table from Pivot Tables.

flattabler

Pivot tables are generally used to present raw and summary data. They are generated from spreadsheets and, more recently, also from R (pivottabler).

If we generate pivot tables from our own data, flattabler package is not necessary. But, if we get data in pivot table format and need to represent or analyse it using another tool, this package can be very helpful: It can save us several hours of programming or manual transformation.

flattabler package offers a set of operations that allow us to transform one or more pivot tables into a flat table.

Installation

You can install the released version of flattabler from CRAN with:

install.packages("flattabler")

And the development version from GitHub with:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("josesamos/flattabler")

Example

A pivot table contains label rows and columns, and an array of values, usually numeric data. It can contain additional information, such as table header or footer.

Below is an example of a pivot table obtained from the pivottabler package. It is included in flattabler package in the form of the variable df_pivottabler, defined as a data frame.

The transformation to obtain a flat table from the previous pivot table using flattabler package is as follows:

library(flattabler)

ft <- pivot_table(df_pivottabler) |>
  define_labels(n_col = 2, n_row = 2) |>
  fill_labels() |>
  remove_agg() |>
  fill_values() |>
  unpivot(na_rm = TRUE)

The result is a tibble object that can be further transformed, for example, by the dplyr package to remove the added data.

ft <- ft |>
  dplyr::filter(col2 != "Total") |>
  dplyr::filter(row2 != "Total")

The result obtained is as follows:

Once we have defined the necessary transformations for a pivot table, we can apply them to any other with the same structure. Candidate tables can have different number of rows or columns, depending on the number of labels, but they must have the same number of rows and columns of labels, and the same number of header or footer rows, so that the transformations are the same for each table.

To easily perform this operation, we define a function f from the transformations, as shown below.

f <- function(pt) {
  pt |>
    set_page(1, 1) |>
    define_labels(n_col = 2, n_row = 2) |>
    remove_top(1) |>
    fill_labels() |>
    remove_agg() |>
    fill_values() |>
    remove_k() |>
    replace_dec() |>
    unpivot()
}

folder <- system.file("extdata", "csvfolder", package = "flattabler")
lpt <- read_text_folder(folder)

lft <- flatten_table_list(lpt, f)

lft
#> # A tibble: 201 × 6
#>    page  col1  col2  row1  row2  value
#>    <chr> <chr> <chr> <chr> <chr> <chr>
#>  1 M1    b1    a01   e2    d4    1.88 
#>  2 M1    b1    a05   e1    d1    1.91 
#>  3 M1    b1    a05   e2    d3    1.10 
#>  4 M1    b1    a05   e2    d4    2.25 
#>  5 M1    b1    a09   e1    d1    2.55 
#>  6 M1    b1    a09   e1    d2    2.74 
#>  7 M1    b1    a09   e2    d3    3.99 
#>  8 M1    b1    a13   e1    d1    2.99 
#>  9 M1    b1    a13   e1    d2    1.02 
#> 10 M1    b1    a13   e2    d3    3.48 
#> # ℹ 191 more rows

In this way we can generate a flat table from a list of pivot tables. The list of pivot tables is generated using package functions to import them from various data sources.