I love interactive pivot tables. That is the number one reason why I keep using spreadsheet software. The ability to look at data quickly in lots of different ways, without a single line of code helps me to get an understanding of the data really fast.

Perhaps I can do the same now in R as well. At yesterday’s LondonR meeting Enzo Martoglio presented briefly his rpivotTable package. Enzo builds on Nicolas Krutchen’s PivotTable.js JavaScript library that provides drag’n’drop functionality and wraps it with htmlwidget into R. The result is an interactive pivot table rendered in either your default browser or the viewer pane of RStudio with one line of code:

## Install packages
library(devtools)
install_github("ramnathv/htmlwidgets") 
install_github("smartinsightsfromdata/rpivotTable")
## Load rpivotTable
library(rpivotTable)
data(mtcars)
## One line to create pivot table
rpivotTable(mtcars, rows="gear", col="cyl", aggregatorName="Average", 
vals="mpg", rendererName="Treemap")

The following animated Gif from Nicolas’ project page gives an idea of the interactive functionality of PivotTable.js.

Example of PivotTable.js Source: Nicolas Kruchten

Session Info

R version 3.1.3 (2015-03-09)
Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin13.4.0 (64-bit)
Running under: OS X 10.10.2 (Yosemite)

locale:
[1] en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8/C/en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils    
[5] datasets  methods   base     

other attached packages:
[1] rpivotTable_0.1.3.4

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] digest_0.6.8      htmltools_0.2.6  
[3] htmlwidgets_0.3.2 RJSONIO_1.3-0    
[5] tools_3.1.3       yaml_2.1.13