Write multiple describeBy summaries to individual worksheets in an Excel workbook using openxlsx

Question

I have a large data frame that I summarize in multiple ways using describeBy from the psych library as follows:

library(tidyverse)
library(openxlsx)
library(psych)
.
.
.
 # Describe by Region
  lst1 <- describeBy(df[QUESTIONS], df[REGION_DESCRIPTOR])

  # Describe by Doctor
  lst2 <- describeBy(df[QUESTIONS], df[CARE_DESCRIPTOR])

I then create a new workbook

  wb = createWorkbook()

and start trying to write lst1, lst2,.... into into it, one item per worksheet:

  addWorksheet(wb, REGION_DESCRIPTOR)
  writeData(wb, REGION_DESCRIPTOR, lst1)

  addWorksheet(wb, CARE_DESCRIPTOR)
  writeData(wb, CARE_DESCRIPTOR, lst2)

Unfortunately, I get an error message:

Error in as.data.frame.default(x, stringsAsFactors = FALSE) : 
  cannot coerce class ‘c("psych", "describeBy")’ to a data.frame

How can I write each describeBy object to a worksheet using openxlsx ? I have tried using writexl , and while it works, I am not happy with the fact that it writes each of the summmaries generated by describeBy to a different worksheet. As I have close to a dozen describeBy 's, each with 3-5 categories, this rapidly becomes unwieldy.

Thank you in advance for your help

Thomas Philips

Answer 1

The object output from describeBy is a list . We could rbind them to a single matrix or data.frame and it should work

do.call(rbind, describeBy(mtcars[, 'mpg'], mtcars[, 'vs']) )