Reporting with R Markdown

Course Description

R Markdown is an easy to use formatting language you can use to reveal insights from data and author your findings as a PDF, HTML file, or Shiny app. In this course, you’ll learn how to create and modify each element of a Markdown file, including the code, text, and metadata. You’ll analyze data with dplyr, create visualizations with ggplot2, and author your analyses and plots as reports. You’ll gain hands-on experience of building reports as you work with real-world data from the International Finance Corporation (IFC)—learning how to efficiently organize reports using code chunk options, create lists and tables, and include a table of contents. By the end of the course, you’ll have the skills you need to add your brand’s fonts and colors using parameters and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), to make your reports stand out.

What You’ll Learn

Getting Started with R Markdown

In this chapter, you’ll learn about the three components of a Markdown file: the code, the text, and the metadata. You’ll also learn to add and modify each of these elements to your own reports, as you create your first Markdown files.

Improving the Report

Now that you’ve learned how to add, label, and modify code chunks, you’ll learn about code chunk options. You can use these to determine whether the code and results appear in the knit report. You’ll also discover how to create lists and tables to include in your report.

Adding Analyses and Visualizations

In this chapter, you’ll use dplyr to begin to analyze the World Bank IFC datasets and include the analyses in your report. You’ll then create visualizations of the data using ggplot2 and learn to modify how the plots display in your knit report.

Customizing the Report

In this final chapter, you’ll learn how to customize your report by adding a table of contents and adding a CSS file to the YAML header, to personalize reports with your brand’s fonts and colors. You’ll also learn how to efficiently create new reports from your data using parameters, which will save you time from manually updating existing reports to create new ones.