footnote: Add footnotes to flextable

In flextable: Functions for Tabular Reporting

Add footnotes to flextable

Description

The function let add footnotes to a flextable object by adding some symbols in the flextable and associated notes in the footer of the flextable.

Symbols are added to the cells designated by the selection i and j. If you use i = c(1,3) and j = c(2,5), then you will add the symbols (or the repeated symbol) to cells ⁠[1,2]⁠ and ⁠[3,5]⁠.

See https://www.ardata.fr/en/flextable-gallery/2022-06-23-separate-headers/ for the example shown

Usage

footnote(
  x,
  i = NULL,
  j = NULL,
  value,
  ref_symbols = NULL,
  part = "body",
  inline = FALSE,
  sep = "; ",
  symbol_sep = ""
)

Arguments

x	a 'flextable' object, see flextable-package to learn how to create 'flextable' object.
i	row selector, see section Row selection with the i parameter in <Selectors in flextable>.
j	column selector, see section Column selection with the j parameter in <Selectors in flextable>.
value	a call to function as_paragraph().
ref_symbols	character value, symbols to append that will be used as references to notes.
part	part selector, see section Part selection with the part parameter in <Selectors in flextable>. Value 'all' is not allowed by the function.
inline	whether to add footnote on same line as previous footnote or not
sep	used only when inline = TRUE, character string to use as a separator between footnotes.
symbol_sep	separator to insert between multiple footnote symbols in the same cell (e.g. "," to produce ⁠1,2⁠ instead of 12). Default is "" (no separator, backward compatible).

See Also

Other functions to compose cell content: append_chunks(), as_paragraph(), compose(), labelizor(), prepend_chunks(), void()

Examples

ft_1 <- flextable(head(iris))
ft_1 <- footnote(ft_1,
  i = 1, j = 1:3,
  value = as_paragraph(
    c(
      "This is footnote one",
      "This is footnote two",
      "This is footnote three"
    )
  ),
  ref_symbols = c("a", "b", "c"),
  part = "header"
)
ft_1 <- valign(ft_1, valign = "bottom", part = "header")
ft_1 <- autofit(ft_1)

ft_2 <- flextable(head(iris))
ft_2 <- autofit(ft_2)
ft_2 <- footnote(ft_2,
  i = 1, j = 1:2,
  value = as_paragraph(
    c(
      "This is footnote one",
      "This is footnote two"
    )
  ),
  ref_symbols = c("a", "b"),
  part = "header", inline = TRUE
)
ft_2 <- footnote(ft_2,
  i = 1, j = 3:4,
  value = as_paragraph(
    c(
      "This is footnote three",
      "This is footnote four"
    )
  ),
  ref_symbols = c("c", "d"),
  part = "header", inline = TRUE
)
ft_2

ft_3 <- flextable(head(iris))
ft_3 <- autofit(ft_3)
ft_3 <- footnote(
  x = ft_3, i = 1:3, j = 1:3,
  ref_symbols = "a",
  value = as_paragraph("This is footnote one")
)
ft_3

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