Here at RStudio, we love tables. No, not tables like the one pictured above, but data tables. Did you know that data tables have been used since the 2nd century? They’ve really been around.

Tables are a fantastic way to communicate lists of quantitative and qualitative information. Sometimes, tables can fall very short of their potential for greatness. But that was the past: we now have some excellent R packages at our disposal to generate well-designed and functional presentation tables. And because of this renaissance of table-making in R, we’re announcing a contest: The 2020 RStudio Table Contest. It will run from September 15th to October 31st, 2020.

One thing we love about the R community is how open and generous you are in sharing the code and process you use to solve problems. This lets others learn from your experience and invites feedback to improve your work. We hope this contest encourages more sharing and helps to recognize the many outstanding ways people work with and display data with R.

Contest Judging Criteria

Tables will be judged based on technical merit, artistic design, and quality of documentation. We recognize that some tables may excel in only one category and others in more than one or all categories. Honorable mentions will be awarded with this in mind.

We are working with maintainers of many of the R community’s most popular R packages for building tables, including Yihui Xie of DT, Rich Iannone of gt, Greg Lin of reactable, David Gohel of flextable, David Hugh-Jones of huxtable , and Hao Zhu of kableExtra. Many of these maintainers will help review submissions built with their packages.

Requirements

A submission must include all code and data used to replicate your entry. This may be a fully knitted R Markdown document with code (for example published to RPubs or shinyapps.io), a repository, or rstudio.cloud project.

A submission can use any table-making package available in R, not just the ones mentioned above.

Submission Types – We are looking for three types of table submissions,

1. Single Table Example: This may highlight interesting structuring of content, useful and tricky features – for example, enabling interaction – or serve as an example of a common table popular in a specific field. Be sure to document your code for clarity.
2. Tutorial: It’s all about teaching us how to craft an excellent table or understand a package’s features. This may include several tables and narrative.
3. Other: For submissions that do not easily fit into one of the types above.

Category – Given that tables have different features and purposes, we’d also like you to further categorize the submission table. There are four categories, static-HTML, interactive-HTML, static-print, and interactive-Shiny. Simply choose the one that best fits your table.

You can submit your entry for the contest by filling the form at rstd.io/table-contest-2020. The form will generate a post on RStudio Community, which you can then edit further at a later date. You may make multiple entries.

The deadline for submissions is October 31st, 2020, at midnight Pacific Time.

Prizes

Grand Prize

• One year of shinyapps.io Basic plan or one year of RStudio.Cloud Premium.
• Additionally, any number of RStudio t-shirts, books, and mugs (worth up to $200).
  Unfortunately, we may not be able to send t-shirts, books, or other items larger than stickers to non-US addresses for which shipping and customs costs are high.

Honorable Mention

• A good helping of hex stickers for RStudio packages plus a side of hexes for table-making packages, and other goodies.

Tables Gallery

Previous Shiny Contests have driven significant improvement to the popular Shiny Gallery and we hope this contest will spur development of a similar Tables Gallery. Winners and other participants may be invited to feature their work on such a resource.

We will announce the winners and their submissions on the RStudio blog, RStudio Community, and also on Twitter.