Great Tables submission

[rich-iannone]

Submitting Author: Name (@rich-iannone)
All current maintainers: (@rich-iannone, @machow)
Package Name: Great Tables
One-Line Description of Package: Make awesome display tables using Python.
Repository Link: https://github.com/posit-dev/great-tables
Version submitted: v0.13.0
EiC: @Batalex
Editor: @Batalex
Reviewer 1: @cjbassin
Reviewer 2: @glemaitre
Archive: TBD
JOSS DOI: TBD
Version accepted: v0.14.0
Date accepted (month/day/year): 01/03/2025

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Description

The Great Tables package is all about creating tables for the purpose of presentation. You can use
Pandas or Polars DataFrames as inputs, and the Great Tables API allows you to:

• structure the data using column spanners and row groups, and add header and footer information
• format the data with a wide range of powerful formatting methods
• style the table to make it aesthetically pleasing or to highlight important information
• integrate the table display into notebooks, Quarto documents or web pages, and export the table
  as HTML or a variety of image formats

Scope

• Please indicate which category or categories.
  Check out our package scope page to learn more about our
  scope. (If you are unsure of which category you fit, we suggest you make a pre-submission inquiry):

  • Data retrieval
  • Data extraction
  • Data processing/munging
  • Data deposition
  • Data validation and testing
  • Data visualization¹
  • [] Workflow automation
  • Citation management and bibliometrics
  • Scientific software wrappers
  • Database interoperability

Domain Specific

• Geospatial
• Education

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The package can be seen as a data visualization package, but it is perhaps more in the direction of data presentation/publication (i.e., not datavis in the traditional sense). However, tables are important and they are ubiquitous in all sorts of scientific publications.

• Who is the target audience and what are scientific applications of this package?

The target audience is anyone who needs to present data in the tabular format. There is a particular focus on science and engineering applications as many of the formatting methods are geared toward this audience (e.g., scientific notation, significant figures, units notation, chemistry notation, etc.).

• Are there other Python packages that accomplish the same thing? If so, how does yours differ?

There are only a few packages that deal with tabular data presentation. The Pandas styler API is probably the best known of these, but it is limited in its capabilities. A big part of Great Tables is the ability to structure a table to a more traditional table format (one you'd commonly see in journals or reports) instead of interactive tables that are more common in web apps (i.e., displaying hundreds or thousands of rows of data). The formatting capabilities of Great Tables are also much more extensive than Pandas styler or other packages.

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#184

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Footnotes

1. Please fill out a pre-submission inquiry before submitting a data visualization package. ↩

[Batalex]

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Editor comments

This is a really solid submission, and I am super excited for us to contribute to great_tables. I'll get started on finding an editor for this submission.

suggestion: TIL we can store CONTRIBUTING.md in .github. Would you mind adding a section in the README pointing to this file? I knew what I was looking for, but I think the entry barrier for new contributors would be lower if they did not have to open a PR to see the contributing guidelines.

todo: We can get started, but during the review's course, we should add the paper.md file as part of the review.

[cmarmo]

Hi @rich-iannone, thanks again for submitting Great Tables to pyOpenSci!
I'm Chiara and I'm following up as editor in chief for the next three months.
I'm glad to announce that @Batalex is volounteering to serve as editor too for your submission.... Thanks a lot Alex!