I have read the bookdown book and still cannot figure this out. I am trying to create a Word report through bookdown. I want to use kableExtra to add striping to my tables and also to bold my last table row. Can kableExtra be used when knitting to Word ?

This is a subset of my code :

library(dplyr)    
knitr::opts_chunk$set(echo = TRUE)
library(knitr)  # required for kable
library(kableExtra)  # required for kableExtra
options(knit.r.table.format = "markdown")

myRegion <- c("a", "b", "c")
Current_Perc_1 <- c(85.9, 90.8, 89.7)
Current_Perc_2 <- c(88.0, 91.0, 89.0)
tab_curr_est_2_times <- cbind(myRegion, Current_Perc_1, Current_Perc_2)
tab_curr_est_2_times <- as.data.frame(tab_curr_est_2_times, stringsAsFactors = FALSE)
tab_curr_est_2_times$Current_Perc_1 <- as.double(tab_curr_est_2_times$Current_Perc_1)
tab_curr_est_2_times$Current_Perc_2 <- as.double(tab_curr_est_2_times$Current_Perc_2)
tab_curr_est_2_times$curr_change_1_to_2 <- tab_curr_est_2_times$Current_Perc_2 - tab_curr_est_2_times$Current_Perc_1

tab_1_curr <- tab_curr_est_2_times
tab_1_curr[ nrow(tab_1_curr)+1 , ] <- NA
tab_1_curr$myRegion[ nrow(tab_1_curr) ] <- "BRITISH COLUMBIA"
tab_1_curr$Current_Perc_1[ nrow(tab_1_curr) ] <- 88.4
tab_1_curr$Current_Perc_2[ nrow(tab_1_curr) ] <- 89.3
tab_1_curr$curr_change_1_to_2[ nrow(tab_1_curr) ] <- 0.9

knitr::kable(tab_1_curr, digits = 1, align = "lccc", position = "c", 
         caption = "\\: my table caption here") %>%
  kable_styling("striped") %>%
  row_spec(nrow(tab_1_curr), bold = TRUE)

My bookdown settings are as follows:

--- 
title: "My Report"
author: "Me"
date: "`r Sys.Date()`"
site: "bookdown::bookdown_site"
output:
  bookdown::word_document2:
    fig_caption: true
documentclass: book
---

When I click on the Knit button in RStudio, I get this table:

I want the last row to be bold and I want the table striped. How do I do this ? (I also get the following error: "Currently generic markdown table using pandoc is not supported.")

Pandoc version ≥2

Yes, this can be done with Pandoc (see David's answer)

Original answer follows:

Pandoc version <2

The conversion to word is made via pandoc. Currently pandoc only creates four type of tables,

• simple tables
• multiline_tables
• grid_tables
• pipe_tables

Some of those supported formats are demontrated in pander and in the pandoc manual p 35-39.

So you cannot create the stripped table currently with pandoc.

You also have a good summary of how you can use tables in rmarkdown.rstudio.