A High-Quality Reports using R Markdown

A great way to share data and data analysis narrative in R

You performed exploratory data analysis using R and would like to share the work with a diverse set of audiences, people who understand R and people who do not understand R but are interested to understand your analysis and narrative.

R Markdown is the tool in your R repertoire to help you create reports with narrative, plots, and data analysis.

Contents discussed in this post.

• What is R Markdown, and how does it help?
• What libraries are required for R Markdown to generate reports?
• How does R Markdown render?
• What are the output formats supported by R Markdown?
• Different components of R Markdown, including code chunks and inline code?
• An example of generating reports in HTML format using R Markdown

R Markdown

R Markdown is a lightweight markup library designed for quickly turning data analysis and narratives into high-quality documents, reports, presentations, and dashboards in static and dynamic/interactive output formats. R Markdown generates documents and presentations to be shared across a multitude of audiences. R Markdown contains the computing code and the narrative to explain the data analysis and data insights.

R Markdown assists you to save and execute R code along with the narratives to generate high-quality reports to be shared in different formats like HTML, doc, and pdf

R Markdown files can contain three different types of content

• A YAML header surrounded by ---
• R code chunks surrounded by ```
• Text mixed with simple text formatting

Libraries needed for R Markdown

install.packages("rmarkdown")
library(knitr)
library(rmarkdown)

knitr takes a plain text document with embedded code as an input, executes the code, and ‘knits’ the results back into the document.

The R package rmarkdown is a library that processes and converts .Rmd files into several formats like HTML, PDF, doc, etc.