What's New in R: January 29, 2024

I’m back, sharing some more new(ish) resources with you.

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Stop making messy line charts and create meaningful plots instead

The first is a great video from Albert Rapp (who also makes videos on the R for the Rest of Us YouTube channel) showing how to stop making spaghetti charts like these:

And instead make easy to comprehend, meaningful line charts like these:

The video shows several tips, including how to use the {gghighlight} package. Check it out!

{babeldown} package

You may think of R as a tool for working with quantitative data, but it can also do a fair amount with qualitative data. Ever receive qualitative data that you need to translate? The {babeldown} package, developed by Maëlle Salmon, can do this for you automatically. Relying on the DeepL translation tool, {babeldown} can convert text to and from 31 different languages. In the past, I’ve used the {googleLanguageR} package to do this type of translation. {babeldown} looks even simpler.

Convert a Word table to Markdown

There is a group of what I think of as quirky R package developers. One of these is Matt Dray (he describes his website as “Fun and learning with R, usually off-piste”). Dray has a post laying out how he developed code to take tables in Microsoft Word and convert them to Markdown with a package he calls {wordup}. If you ever receive tables in Word documents that you want to put into Quarto or RMarkdown documents, you might be interested in this!

I hope you enjoyed this issue of What’s New in R. Got any ideas for resources I should feature in future issues? Comment below!

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