set_doc_properties: Set document properties

In officer: Manipulation of Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel Documents

Set document properties

Description

set Word, PowerPoint or Excel document properties. These are not visible in the document but are available as metadata of the document.

Any character property can be added as a document property. It provides an easy way to insert arbitrary fields. Given the challenges that can be encountered with find-and-replace in word with officer, the use of document fields and quick text fields provides a much more robust approach to automatic document generation from R.

Usage

set_doc_properties(
  x,
  title = NULL,
  subject = NULL,
  creator = NULL,
  description = NULL,
  created = NULL,
  hyperlink_base = NULL,
  ...,
  values = NULL
)

Arguments

x	an rdocx, rpptx or rxlsx object
title, subject, creator, description	text fields
created	a date-time object, written in UTC
hyperlink_base	a string specifying the base URL for relative hyperlinks in the document (only for rdocx).
...	named arguments (names are field names), each element is a single character value specifying value associated with the corresponding field name. These pairs of key-value are added as custom properties. If a value is NULL or NA, the corresponding field is set to ” in the document properties.
values	a named list (names are field names), each element is a single character value specifying value associated with the corresponding field name. If values is provided, argument ... will be ignored.

Note

The "modified" and "lastModifiedBy" properties are set when the document is written: the current time, in UTC, and the name of the user (Sys.info()[["user"]]). A document created from the default template, with read_docx(), read_pptx() or read_xlsx() called without path, gets the current time as "created" property and no "creator".

To write a fixed date in "created" and "modified", set option officer_datetime to a date-time: options(officer_datetime = as.POSIXct("2026-01-01", tz = "UTC")). The same code then produces the same file, byte for byte, whatever the time zone or the locale, which makes it possible to compare files with a checksum.

See Also

Other functions for Word document informations: doc_properties(), docx_bookmarks(), docx_dim(), length.rdocx(), styles_info()

Examples

x <- read_docx()
x <- set_doc_properties(x, title = "title",
  subject = "document subject", creator = "Me me me",
  description = "this document is empty",
  created = Sys.time(),
  yoyo = "yok yok",
  glop = "pas glop")
x <- doc_properties(x)

officer documentation built on Nov. 8, 2026, 1:12 a.m.