Creating Dashboards with shinydashboard

Course Description

Learn to create an interactive dashboard using the shinydashboard package in R. Whether you need to provide a client with information, create a data analysis report, or keep track of the performance of a personal project, shinydashboard can help you create something impactful. Learn the essentials of this powerful package today.

Understand How to Use Dashboards

While reports can provide you with a snapshot of a situation, a dashboard is not only dynamic, meaning that data can be updated in real time but also interactive. This makes for a more immersive experience for your audience.

Learn To Use shinydashboard

In this course, you will learn how to use shinydashboard in R to create a dynamic and interactive dashboard. You will cover the ins and outs of shinydashboard and learn about good UI/UX practices.

Build an Interactive Dashboard

You will first build a shinyApp and then graduate to building a shinydashboard. Then, you learn how to include interactive elements with hover-over effects.

Finally, you will explore how to tweak your design elements of a shinydashboard using CSS code and more. You will be given the opportunity to practice these concepts using various datasets in the context of four different scenarios.

Upon completing this course, you will be better equipped to create tailor-made dashboards for any purpose using shinydashboard.

What You’ll Learn

ShinyApps

Before you build a shinydashboard, you will first need to understand what a shinyApp is. In this chapter, you will learn what a shinyApp is, and learn what goes into a shinyApp. At the end of this chapter, you will be able to render your own shinyApp.

Interactive plots and geospatial maps

In this chapter, you will learn to further enhance your shinydashboard by inserting interactive elements. These will include graphs, geospatial maps, and tables that dashboard users can interact with in real-time.

Basics of a shinydashboard

In the previous chapter, you learned about shiny apps. In this chapter, you will realize that a shinydashboard is really just another shiny app but with more tweakable features. The same outputs and inputs discussed in the previous chapter can be used in exactly the same manner here. You will then learn to carry out some simple wire-framing for a dashboard, during which you can decide where to position outputs and inputs in the dashboard.

Adding design elements and improving UI/UX

Now that you are familiar with shinydashboard, we can now add design elements. We will be able to change background colors, modify box dimensions and so on. We will also discuss some basic principles of good UI/UX. Finally, we will show how statuses and CSS formatting can be utilized.