[R] Best practice for copying statistical output from RStudio to Word using Times New Roman

[John Kane]

I second Greg's recommendation.  Creating a Quarto or Rmarkdown
document and doing all text production and analysis in it  is much more
productive. It definitely makes changes and editing much easier and  much
less error prone.

My personal preference is Quarto but either is several orders of magnitude
better than cut and paste.

On Fri, 21 Nov 2025 at 10:40, Greg Snow <538280 using gmail.com> wrote:

> Here are a couple of things that I have found useful for when you need
> the final results in MS Word and you want nice formatting.
>
> Use a quarto or Rmarkdown document and have knitr/pandoc create the
> word document instead of copy/paste.  The pander package does some
> nice formatting for many of the statistical routines that pandoc
> converts into tables.
>
> If you need to copy and paste, first copy and paste to MS Excel (and
> for tables, you can use write.table with file="clipboard" and
> sep="\t", then just paste in Excel).  Then maybe make some adjustments
> in Excel, then copy from Excel to Word, this will keep things as a
> table in word, so changing the font will not mess with the alignment.
>
> The broom package takes output from lm models and puts them into data
> frames (tibbles) that can be exported to Excel>Word instead of relying
> on fixed width fonts and spaces for formatting.
>
>
> On Fri, Nov 21, 2025 at 8:27 AM tgs77m--- via R-help
> <r-help using r-project.org> wrote:
> >
> > The root cause is that RStudio’s output console is hardwired to use
> monospaced fonts like Consolas, Courier, or Monaco, which preserve column
> alignment. Times New Roman (TTR), being proportional, breaks that alignment
> when pasted into Word unless you manually reformat.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > From: CALUM POLWART <polc1410 using gmail.com>
> > Sent: Friday, November 21, 2025 5:02 AM
> > To: Viechtbauer, Wolfgang (NP) <
> wolfgang.viechtbauer using maastrichtuniversity.nl>
> > Cc: Thomas Subia <tgs77m using yahoo.com>; r-help using r-project.org
> > Subject: Re: [R] Best practice for copying statistical output from
> RStudio to Word using Times New Roman
> >
> >
> >
> > As Wolfgang says.
> >
> >
> >
> > Ctrl-Shift-V and plain text.
> >
> >
> >
> > That said... I bet some of it looks awful as it's probably spaced for a
> fixed width font.
> >
> >
> >
> > On Fri, 21 Nov 2025, 10:28 Viechtbauer, Wolfgang (NP) via R-help, <
> r-help using r-project.org <mailto:r-help using r-project.org> > wrote:
> >
> > Dear Thomas,
> >
> > Just paste without formatting. Then the pasted text will be in the
> active font of the Word document.
> >
> > Best,
> > Wolfgang
> >
> > > -----Original Message-----
> > > From: R-help <r-help-bounces using r-project.org <mailto:
> r-help-bounces using r-project.org> > On Behalf Of tgs77m--- via R-help
> > > Sent: Friday, November 21, 2025 07:51
> > > To: r-help using r-project.org <mailto:r-help using r-project.org>
> > > Subject: [R] Best practice for copying statistical output from RStudio
> to Word
> > > using Times New Roman
> > >
> > > Colleagues
> > >
> > > I am writing an article using Microsoft Word for a journal that
> requires
> > > Times New Roman for all text (including tables and statistical
> outputs).
> > > However, copying console output from RStudio (e.g., summary(lm()))
> into Word
> > > retains the RStudio monospace font, and Word does not automatically
> convert
> > > it to Times New Roman. Manually restyling each pasted block is
> > > time-consuming and error-prone.
> > >
> > > s there a recommended workflow for preserving proper alignment while
> > > achieving Times New Roman text formatting when transferring statistical
> > > results from RStudio into Word?
> > >
> > > System:
> > > Windows 11
> > > R 4.5.1
> > > RStudio 2024.12.0+
> > >
> > > Thanks for any guidance or best practices.
> > >
> > > Best regards,
> > > Thomas Subia
> >
> > ______________________________________________
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> >
> >
> >         [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
> >
> > ______________________________________________
> > R-help using r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see
> > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> > PLEASE do read the posting guide
> https://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>
>
>
> --
> Gregory (Greg) L. Snow Ph.D.
> 538280 using gmail.com
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help using r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide
> https://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>


-- 
John Kane
Kingston ON Canada

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