tatoo ("table tools") provides functions to combine data.frames in ways that require additional effort in base R, and to add metadata (id, title, ...) that can be used for printing and xlsx export. In addition, the Tatto_report class is provided as a convenient helper to write several such tables to a workbook, one table per worksheet.

# tatoo is available from CRAN
install.packages("tatoo")

# Or you can install the development version from GitHub:
install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("statistikat/tatoo")

tag_table(head(cars), tt_meta(table_id = "t1", title = "Data about cars"))
mash_table(head = head(cars), tail = tail(cars), mash_method = "row")
mash_table(head = head(cars), tail = tail(cars), mash_method = "col")
comp_table(head = head(cars), tail = tail(cars))
stack_table(head = head(cars), tail = tail(cars))

None of the examples are particularly hard to do in base R, but tatoo provides functions with a clean interface and nice print and export methods for the created objects. Please refer to the package vignette for more examples.

tatoo is stable and in maintenance mode. While tatoo is effective at what it does once you figure out how it works, the API is not as nice and intuitive as I intended it to be. It will continue to receive small updates and bugfixes, but it is not planned to implement new features.