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What's New in R: March 18, 2024

Welcome to this week’s edition of ​What’s New in R ​! This week, we’re featuring a tutorial on making beautiful maps to print, a book on the fundamentals of telling stories with data, and examples of how to automate data quality checks. Let’s dive in! Making Circular Maps in ggplot I love when people use R to make things in real life. That’s exactly what Meghan Harris did last year, when she created a map for her best friend’s wedding. In this blog post, she goes step-by-step through the...

How to know if your data is tidy

One of the most frequent questions we get when we teach R is “How do I know if my data is in a tidy format?” Rightfully so. Tidy data is a powerful concept and I remember asking myself the exact same questions when I first learned about tidy data. So to help you answer this question, let me give you an answer to this question that eventually helped me and made my life easier. But beware: You might find the answer a little bit unintuitive at first. Forget about tidy data Yup, that’s right....

What's New in R: March 11, 2024

Welcome to this week’s edition of ​What’s New in R ​! This week, we’re featuring a new version of Quarto, a new-to-me package for geocoding, and a package to ensure your plots are accessible to all. Let’s dive in! Quarto 1.4 Quarto 1.4 is out. The headline new features are dashboards and PDFs made with the new typst format. If you’ve used the {flexdashboard} package to make dashboards in R Markdown, you’ve probably been waiting for the equivalent functionality in Quarto. It’s now here! And if...

What's New in R: March 4, 2024

Welcome to this week’s edition of ​What’s New in R ​! This week, we’re featuring posts on the complete() function from the {tidyr} package, new features in the table-making {gt} package, and a tutorial on adding logos to images. Let’s dive in! You tidyr::complete() me Imagine you’ve got a dataset that looks like this: As a human being (you are human, correct?), you can look at this and know that this means the dog got 0 walks on Thursday and the cat got 0 walks on Wednesday. But computers are...

Use tidyselect helpers to grab the right data

Tidyselect helpers are neat little helper function that help you, well, select the right data. This can make your life easier when you want to either grab many different columns or even transform many columns using across() . For example, have you ever found yourself typing out repetitive calculations like this: Here, we converted all the measurements that are given in millimeters (mm) to centimeters (cm). To do so, we had to divide the mm numbers by 10 (yay, metric system 🥳) and select all...

What's New in R: February 26, 2024

In the latest issue of What’s New in R, see some more new resources! Want to get this in your inbox? Sign up for What's New in R . Creating Population Pyramid Plots in R with ggplot2 Ever wondered how to make population pyramids in R? In this blog post, Steven P. Sanderson shows you how! It might seem tricky at first to make a population pyramid, but once you see how it works, you’ll be making your own in no time! The Top Programming Languages 2023 Every year, IEEE Spectrum puts out a report...

What's New in R: February 20, 2024

In the latest issue of What’s New in R, see some more new resources! Want to get this in your inbox? Sign up for What's New in R . Stacked line chart with inline labels One of the best parts of making data viz in R is that you can learn from others’ code. The website R Graph Gallery has a ton of great examples of charts made in R. One I came across recently is this stacked line chart of aggregated household wealth in countries around the world. The tutorial for this chart , originally made by...

How to add sparklines to a {gt} table

Any table can be spiced up by adding small visual elements to it. Ideally, this makes the table more engaging and informative. One popular visual element that can get both jobs done is a sparkline . These are little line charts in a table cell that can give you a miniature overview of a time series evolution over time. Sounds complicated? It probably becomes clear when you see it in action. Here, have a look: See those little lines. They show you exactly how the open price of the stock prices...

What's New in R: February 12, 2024

The latest issue of What’s New in R is out with some more new resources! Want to get this in your inbox? Sign up for What's New in R . Workshops for Ukraine For the past couple years, Dariia Mykhailyshyna has been running a set of data-focused workshops to support Ukraine as it struggles with the Russian invasion. They have hosted workshops on a wide range of R topics and you can get access to recordings of past sessions and sign up to attend future workshops. Re-constructing Google Forms...

What's New in R: February 5, 2024

In the latest issue of What’s New in R, see some more new resources! Want to get this in your inbox? Sign up for What's New in R . Efficiency and Consistency: Automate Subset Graphics with {ggplot2} and {purrr} Cédric Scherer is a master of data viz in R . In this article he explains how you can use the {ggplot2} and {purrr} packages to make multiple similar plots at the same time ( it’s a technique I’ve used a lot myself ). R for Data Science, Second Edition The second edition of R for Data...