add_body_row: Add a body row with spanning labels

In flextable: Functions for Tabular Reporting

Add a body row with spanning labels

Description

Add a single row to the body where labels can span multiple columns (merged cells) via the colwidths argument.

Labels are associated with a number of columns to merge that default to one if not specified. In this case, you have to make sure that the number of labels is equal to the number of columns displayed.

The function can add only one single row by call.

Labels can also be formatted with as_paragraph().

Usage

add_body_row(x, top = TRUE, values = list(), colwidths = integer(0))

Arguments

x	a 'flextable' object, see flextable-package to learn how to create 'flextable' object.
top	should the row be inserted at the top or the bottom.
values	values to add. It can be a list, a character() vector or a call to as_paragraph(). If it is a list, it can be a named list with the names of the columns of the original data.frame or the colkeys; this is the recommended method because it allows to keep the original data types and therefore allows to perform conditional formatting. If a character, columns of the original data.frame stored in the flextable object are changed to character(); this is often not an issue with footer and header but can be inconvenient if adding rows into body as it will change data types to character and prevent efficient conditional formatting.
colwidths	the number of columns to merge in the row for each label

See Also

flextable(), set_caption()

Other row and column operations: add_body(), add_footer(), add_footer_lines(), add_footer_row(), add_header(), add_header_lines(), add_header_row(), delete_columns(), delete_part(), delete_rows(), paginate(), separate_header(), set_header_footer_df, set_header_labels(), split_columns(), split_rows(), split_to_pages()

Examples

library(flextable)

ft01 <- fp_text_default(color = "red")
ft02 <- fp_text_default(color = "orange")

pars <- as_paragraph(
  as_chunk(c("(1)", "(2)"), props = ft02), " ",
  as_chunk(
    c(
      "My tailor is rich",
      "My baker is rich"
    ),
    props = ft01
  )
)

ft_1 <- flextable(head(mtcars))
ft_1 <- add_body_row(ft_1,
  values = pars,
  colwidths = c(5, 6), top = FALSE
)
ft_1 <- add_body_row(ft_1,
  values = pars,
  colwidths = c(3, 8), top = TRUE
)
ft_1 <- theme_box(ft_1)
ft_1

ft_2 <- flextable(head(airquality))
ft_2 <- add_body_row(ft_2,
  values = c("blah", "bleeeh"),
  colwidths = c(4, 2), top = TRUE
)
ft_2 <- theme_box(ft_2)
ft_2

flextable documentation built on June 2, 2026, 9:08 a.m.