How to Scrape Word Documents with R

Written by Matt Dancho on September 16, 2020


This article is part of a R-Tips Weekly, a weekly video tutorial that shows you step-by-step how to do common R coding tasks.

Today we discuss an awesome skill for automating data collection from word documents:

(Click image to play video)


Here’s a common situation, you’re company has LOTS OF WORD FILES.

They contain tables of information that look like this:

Word Tables


Thinking like a programmer, you can extract this data using officer:


With a little bit of data wrangling with the tidyverse, you’ve got your table extracted & formatted:


Then you use ggplot2 to make a sweet plot:


Whoa - Look at 201! Getting a high “Activity Ratio” - Ratio of Lessons completed to Number of Students Enrolled:


You’ve just automated extracting word tables in R. BOOM! 💥💥💥


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