Automate creation of a data codebook — codebook • codebookr

The codebook function assists with the creation of a codebook for a given data frame.

Usage

codebook(
  df,
  title = NA,
  subtitle = NA,
  description = NA,
  keep_blank_attributes = FALSE,
  no_summary_stats = NULL
)

Arguments

df: The data frame the codebook will describe
title: An optional title that will appear at the top of the Word codebook document
subtitle: An optional subtitle that will appear at the top of the Word codebook document
description: An optional text description of the dataset that will appear on the first page of the Word codebook document
keep_blank_attributes: TRUE or FALSE. By default, the column attributes table will omit the Column description, Source information, Column type, value labels, and skip pattern rows from the column attributes table in the codebook document if those attributes haven't been set. In other words, it won't show blank rows for those attributes. Passing TRUE to the keep_blank_attributes argument will cause the opposite to happen. The column attributes table will include a Column description, Source information, Column type, and value labels row for every column in the data frame - even if they don't have those attributes set.
no_summary_stats: A character vector of column names. The summary statistics will not be added to column attributes table for any column passed to this argument. This can be useful when a column contains values that are sensitive or may be used to identify individual people (e.g., names, addresses, etc.) and the individual values for that column should not appear in the codebook.

Value

An rdocx object that can be printed to a Word document

Details

Codebook expects that df is a data frame that you have read into memory from a saved data file. Please provide the path to the saved data file. This function gets selected attributes about file saved at path and stores those attributes in a data frame, which is later turned into a flextable and added to the codebook document.

Typically, though not necessarily, the first step in creating your codebook will be to add column attributes to your data. The cb_add_col_attributes() function is a convenience function that allows you to add arbitrary attributes to the columns of the data frame. These attributes can later be accessed to fill in the column attributes table of the codebook document. Column attributes can serve a similar function to variable labels in SAS or Stata; however, you can assign many different attributes to a column and they can contain any kind of information you want. For details see cb_add_col_attributes

Examples

if (FALSE) {
study_codebook <- codebook(
  df = study,
  title = "My Example Study",
  subtitle = "A Subtitle for My Example Study Codebook",
  description = "Brief (or long) description of the data."
)

# Create the Word codebook document
print(study_codebook, path = "example_codebook.docx")
}