1 Background
In many industries reports need to be written on a regular basis. Microsoft Word is the corporate standard that is enforced in an organization in a specific, organization dependent, style. If such reports need to contain 100s of pages of tables, figures, numbers, etc. the manual construction of such reports can be lengthy & cumbersome and prone to copy-paste mistakes. The availability of a reporting tool that can generate such reports from a user friendly and intuitive syntax, automatically including desired tables and figures (directly from the original analysis results), leads to a tremendous improvement of report quality and efficiency with which reports can be generated.
The following figure presents the critical elements that such a reporting tool for MS Word needs to be able to handle:
1.1 Why not Rmarkdown?
Recently, a lot of effort is spent in across industries to assess if Rmarkdown can help in the generation of useful Word reports. However, a simple assessment of the support of the critical elements, identified above, reveals that most elements are unsupported by Rmarkdown. In green the elements supported by Rmarkdown and in red the elements that are not supported.
IQReport is a software tool that allows to efficiently generate Word reports in any desired corporate Word style, handling all the above features (and more)