In our consulting work at R for the Rest of Us, we create tables all the time. We don’t just make plain tables, we make tables that look good and communicate well. This is important because: A clean design is more convincing A powerful design stands out so that people actually look at our tables We can use colors to reflect our clients’ branding We recently helped the Oregon Voices project to create customized data reports for every county in Oregon. Among other things, this required creating...
In my course, Using Git and GitHub with R , I talk about GitHub Actions as one of the best reasons to use GitHub. GitHub Actions is a way for you to run code automatically, without you having to touch your computer. Maybe you run a survey and you want to pull the data every day. Or perhaps you want to generate a weekly report. Instead of manually running code in RStudio, you can use GitHub Actions to run this code automatically. Below, I will demonstrate two GitHub Actions: one that imports...
One of the great things about creating data viz with ggplot is that you can create color palettes that match your or your clients' branding. We've written about how we do this in our consulting work . But the way we work is fairly complicated and I was asked recently for a simpler solution to making custom ggplot color palettes. I recorded a video to show how to make three different types of palettes Qualitative (i.e. categorical) Sequential (going from a low to a high value) Diverging (going...
For the past several years, I've worked on a report called Oregon by the Numbers . In this project, I use R to make every single plot in the report: over 250 plots each year. In the time I've worked on this project, I've become more and more efficient at making these plots. My efficiency comes thanks to the walk() function from the purrr package. This function can be confusing, but if you learn how to use it, you too can make hundreds of plots in just a few lines of code. As you'll see in the...
Every once in a while, I talk to tell someone about a project we're working on at R for the Rest of Us and they say to me, "wow, I didn't even know you did that type of work!" I, like nearly everyone, often get so busy that we forget to share what we're so busy with. So, I'm sharing here most of the projects R for the Rest of Us worked on in 2022 (I say most because some are internal and, sadly, we can't share them). R for the Rest of Us does work in two main areas: education and consulting....
Have you heard about ChatGPT ? It's the latest in a line of AI tools that may transform how we write and how we code. ChatGPT takes a question and returns an answer. And it does so in a very human-sounding way . You know Siri? It's kind of like that, but actually good. To test it out, I signed up on the ChatGPT website and entered this prompt: Create a plot using ggplot2 and the palmerpenguins package . What I got back was very impressive. The response, copied verbatim below, shows exactly...
I recently gave a talk titled No Designer Needed: How to Create Beautiful Reports Using Only R at the CANSSI Ontario Statistical Software Conference . This talk showed how we at R for the Rest of Us use the pagedownpackage to make high-quality PDF reports for our clients . In the talk, I explained the two approaches people typically take when making PDFs: Some people make all charts and tables, and then bring in a designer to lay out the report. The problem with this is that it is...
One of the most important tips we teach participants in R in 3 Months is to always use RStudio projects. There are a lot of resources out there that explain why this is useful (see, especially, Jenny Bryan's article Project-Oriented Workflow ). But many of these resources go a bit over the head of newcomers. So, I asked Charlie Hadley to record a video explaining why using RStudio projects is so important. In her video below, you'll see a clear, concise, and simple explanation for the value...
Folks just starting out with R often assume that those of us who are more experienced never need to get help. This is definitely not true! Everyone always searches for help, no matter how advanced an R user you are. Learning how to search for help when you need it is a key skill. One of the places user typically look for help is in the help files that are loaded when you type ?function() (replacing function() with an actual function name, of course). These help files have a particular format...
The thing that first drew me to R was the ability to run the same analysis on different datasets and get a similar output every time: the same graphs, the same analyses, the same structure to the report, but different data, so a different story to tell. We often talk about the power of R in making research analyses reproducible , or in generating parameterized reports which all include variants of the same graphs, but one thing we haven't talked much about is the role R can play in automating...
