Formatting multiple columns with flextable r package

Question

Is it possible to format multiple columns with one line of script using flexitable?

The example includes variables of two different types of double. I'd like to:

1. round variables greater than 1000 to the nearest 1000 and add thousand comma formating, and
2. round variables less than one to two decimal places

This is relatively simple using flextable, but becomes a bore with a much larger data set. I cannot see a way to do this more efficiently.

I could use dplyr to pre-process the data (although the comma formatting requires changing the variable type from double to character). I'd prefer if possible to do this in flextable. I'm aware multi-column formatting is possible with Huxtable. Might it be possible for users to create bespoke set_formatter_type functions?

MWE

set.seed(100)

tib <- tibble(a = letters[1:4],
              b = runif(4)*sample(c(10000, 1000000, 10000000), 4, replace = TRUE),
              c = runif(4)*sample(c(10000, 1000000, 10000000), 4, replace = TRUE),
              d = runif(4)*sample(c(10000, 1000000, 10000000), 4, replace = TRUE),
              e = runif(4),
              f = runif(4))


  regulartable(tib) %>%
  set_formatter(b = function(x) format(round(x, -3), big.mark = ",")) %>% 
  set_formatter(c = function(x) format(round(x, -3), big.mark = ",")) %>% 
  set_formatter(d = function(x) format(round(x, -3), big.mark = ",")) %>% 
  set_formatter(e = function(x) round(x, 2)) %>%
  set_formatter(f = function(x) round(x, 2)) %>%
  print(preview = "docx")

Answer 1

Yes, the documentation can be found here : https://davidgohel.github.io/flextable/articles/format.html#set_formatter-function

and here : https://davidgohel.github.io/flextable/reference/set_formatter.html

set_formatter(b = function(x) format(round(x, -3), big.mark = ","), 
              c = function(x) format(round(x, -3), big.mark = ","), 
              d = function(x) format(round(x, -3), big.mark = ","), 
              e = function(x) round(x, 2), 
              f = function(x) round(x, 2))