Chapter 8 Publishing, Presenting and Reporting

8.1 Introduction

This chapter deals with the way you can disseminate your data, findings and analyses. No in-depth discussions will be presented. This chapter merely outlines the possibilities and refers to external documentation.

There are two distinct strategies to follow: RMarkdown and Shiny. The first is at its heart static, with the possibility to embed interactive elements. The latter is a toolbox to create interactive web applications on top of your data, using only R.

8.2 RMarkdown

The most extensive overview of the possibilities with RMarkdown are presented in “R Markdown: The Definitive Guide” (https://bookdown.org/yihui/rmarkdown/).

RMarkdown is the basis for many output formats: Simple HTML, Word or pdf documents are the most commonly used outputs formats.
However, it is also possible to create presentations (e.g. IOslides, Slidy and Beamer). These options are built right into R. Simply go to File → New File → RMarkdown... and select one of the Presentation options.

Another interesting “static” output format is the Dashboard which is also discussed in the link above.

In summary, these are the output formats to choose from:

  • HTML (with interactive elements using widgets or Shiny)
  • Word
  • Pdf
  • Notebooks
  • Presentations
  • Dashboards
  • Tufte Handouts
  • eBooks using Bookdown
  • Blogs (also general websites) using Blogdown

This entire ebook was written using RMarkdown and build using Bookdown.

8.3 Shiny

On the other side of the spectrum is Shiny. Shiny is not text-oriented as RMarkdown is, but foremost visualization-oriented. Shiny is a toolbox that makes it possible to build a complete data-exploration website using R code only.

There is an excellent book written on shiny: https://mastering-shiny.org/

And this is the official website: https://shiny.rstudio.com/.