What’s New in R: October 5, 2026
Welcome to this week's edition of What's New in R! This week, we're featuring a new approach to building package documentation sites with Quarto, a free guide to building AI agents you can actually trust, and a package that writes your gt tables straight into Excel workbooks. Let's dive in!
A new take on documentation sites for R packages
Bjarke Hautop Kristensen was frustrated that {pkgdown}, the standard tool for building R package websites, has only limited support for Quarto (callout blocks, for example, get flattened into plain blockquotes). So he turned to {altdoc}, which supports Quarto websites natively, and built {altdown}, a theme that recreates the familiar pkgdown look on top of it. He also created {reftip}, which adds hover previews for function references in code chunks, something {downlit} can't do for local packages and S3 methods. If you build package sites and have been wanting the full power of Quarto, this is a really interesting approach.
Trusted Mini-Agents
Will Landau and Sam Parmar have written a free online guide to engineering AI errors out of agentic workflows, aimed at people who need AI to be reliable in high-stakes settings. The core idea is a least-privilege design: the model reasons freely with untrusted tools, then proposes inputs that a human reviews before they run on trusted tools that produce the final results. That shifts the question from 'are these results correct?' to 'is the agent solving the right problem?', which is a much easier thing for a person to check. The guide covers the concepts and then walks through worked examples in R with {ellmer}, {shinychat}, and Shiny (plus Python versions with chatlas).
gtxlsx
The {gtxlsx} package by Jan Marvin Garbuszus, author of {openxlsx2}, takes a {gt} table you've already built and writes it into an Excel workbook as real cells. It keeps the heading, column spanners, row groups, stub, summary rows, footnotes, and styling, and numbers stay numbers: if gt displays $1,234.50, the cell holds 1234.5 with a matching number format. You use wb_add_gt() to add a gt table (or wb_add_html() for an HTML table), and there's even an experimental wb_to_gt() for going the other direction. If you've ever had someone ask for the Excel version of a table you polished in gt, this is the package for you.
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Got any ideas for resources I should feature in future issues of What’s New in R? Leave a comment below!
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