bg: Set background color

In flextable: Functions for Tabular Reporting

Set background color

Description

Change background color of selected rows and columns of a flextable. A function can be used instead of fixed colors.

When bg is a function, it is possible to color cells based on values located in other columns, using hidden columns (those not used by argument colkeys) is a common use case. The argument source has to be used to define what are the columns to be used for the color definition and the argument j has to be used to define where to apply the colors and only accept values from colkeys.

Usage

bg(x, i = NULL, j = NULL, bg, part = "body", source = j)

Arguments

x	a flextable object
i	rows selection
j	columns selection
bg	color to use as background color. If a function, function need to return a character vector of colors.
part	partname of the table (one of 'all', 'body', 'header', 'footer')
source	if bg is a function, source is specifying the dataset column to be used as argument to bg. This is only useful if j is colored with values contained in other columns.

Note

Word does not allow you to apply transparency to table cells or paragraph shading.

See Also

Other sugar functions for table style: align(), bold(), color(), empty_blanks(), font(), fontsize(), highlight(), italic(), keep_with_next(), line_spacing(), padding(), rotate(), tab_settings(), valign()

Examples

ft_1 <- flextable(head(mtcars))
ft_1 <- bg(ft_1, bg = "wheat", part = "header")
ft_1 <- bg(ft_1, i = ~ qsec < 18, bg = "#EFEFEF", part = "body")
ft_1 <- bg(ft_1, j = "drat", bg = "#606060", part = "all")
ft_1 <- color(ft_1, j = "drat", color = "white", part = "all")
ft_1

if (require("scales")) {
  ft_2 <- flextable(head(iris))
  colourer <- col_numeric(
    palette = c("wheat", "red"),
    domain = c(0, 7)
  )
  ft_2 <- bg(ft_2,
    j = c(
      "Sepal.Length", "Sepal.Width",
      "Petal.Length", "Petal.Width"
    ),
    bg = colourer, part = "body"
  )
  ft_2
}

flextable documentation built on Aug. 24, 2025, 5:07 p.m.