Instructions to Render gt table Quarto/Markdown to MS Word

[twelvespot]

Hi there,

I've tried to follow the example from release 7 and the gtcars dataset to render a report to Word. However, the table doesn't show up in the render. Am I doing something wrong? I show an example here where I call the table at the end of a code chunk AND I try to call the table inline with single backticks.

`---
title: "gt cars practice"
format: docx
editor: visual

Quarto

#| include: false
library(tidyverse)
library(gt)

Here's a gt table for gtcars

#| echo: false
# Use `gtcars` to create a gt table;
# add a header and then export as
# OOXML code for Word
tab_rtf <-
  gtcars %>%
  dplyr::select(mfr, model) %>%
  dplyr::slice(1:2) %>%
  gt() %>%
  tab_header(
    title = md("Data listing from **gtcars**"),
    subtitle = md("`gtcars` is an R dataset")
  ) |> 
    as_word()
tab_rtf

Here should be the table too
r tab_rtf
`
The screenshot below is what is rendered.

Any help, please!

[James-G-Hill]

I've been able to get gt::gt() to render a table to Word within a Quarto document without the as_word function. However, this only worked on a Windows 11 machine for me. When I deployed my application to a Ubuntu server the rendering failed and output the xml-type code just as in your screenshot above.

[AaronGullickson]

Try using the yaml header:

prefer-html: true

And then just print the gt as usual out of the code chunk without as_word. Word basically will try to read the html code to make the table.The resulting table in word often needs some post-rendering formatting to get everything looking right, but it will all be there.

[renatovargas]

What's the point of as_word() if you can't use the output for anything? I've tried using it with writeClipboard(as_word(gt_tbl)) and when I paste to Word, I just get the raw OOXML pasted there. I can do writeClipboard(as_html(gt_tbl)), paste to Excel and then paste back into word. Of course, this is when not working with quarto or md, which will render just fine out of the box, without adding as_anything(). But for quick outputs, I wish I could just paste the OOXML output in Word and you'd get a table. What's the point of as_word() then, how does anyone use it?