Rmarkdown report10/2/2023 ![]() You can each edit documents locally and then you push changes to GitHub. You can create shared repositories that you and your collaborators have access to. GitHub facilitates working with others, another benefit of using RMarkdown. They're not the same, but they work closely together. If you're like most people, you probably think that's synonymous with GitHub. Collaborate with Colleagues More Efficiently Learning git is not easy (definitely use the Happy Git with R book), but it is definitely worth it. You can keep one report file and refer back to the history to see how that file has changed over time (and if you got rid of something you want to restore, it's easy to do!). Use RMarkdown and you'll never have to have files called report-final.docx, report-final-final.docx, and report-final-for-real.docx. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, think of it as the “Track Changes” features from Microsoft Word on steroids. Git manages the evolution of a set of files – called a repository – in a sane, highly structured way. Its original purpose was to help groups of developers work collaboratively on big software projects. As Jenny Bryan writes in her book Happy Git with R, Using a version control system like git enables you to keep a record of your work (i.e. The next level of benefit of using RMarkdown comes from incorporating it with git. Use Version Control (and Never See a final-final-final.docx File Again) The Urban Institute had a really nice write-up last year of how they do this in creating fact sheets for all 50 US states. ![]() With RMarkdown, you can write code that automatically does this, creating 10 reports as quickly as you can create one. Say you have data on 10 different programs and you need to produce a single report for each one. One thing that blew my mind when I first learned about it was parameterized reports. When you start to go deep with R and RMarkdown, you realize that the possibilities are huge. Produce Many Reports from One RMarkdown Document Looking for a video to share with others that demonstrates the value of reproducibility? Here you go ( hat tip to Jenny Bryan for bring this to my attention). Now, I just update my data file, maybe adjust my filter code a little bit at the beginning, and then re-run everything. Before, that would mean re-running everything manually. Maybe another school gets their data to me in at a later date. Maybe I get a few more consent forms for students so now I can add a few more people into my data. In a recent conversation, Dana Wanzer told me how reproducibility in R helps her: This is something I've written about previously, as have others. Going one step further, working with RMarkdown enables reproducibility. Embrace Reproducibility to Save Yourself Time In situations like this, there is a really nice solution, namely having RMarkdown use a reference document so that any document you knit to Word takes on your organization's style. I was talking recently with a potential client who complained that she struggled to get her staff to correctly use their organization's Word template for reports. the content of what you're saying, not how it looks). ![]() Writing in RMarkdown, which is a very simple, text-based process, forces you to focus exclusively on your writing (i.e. This slows down the writing process and is best done at the end of writing. If you care at all about how things look, you've likely spent time while writing adjusting fonts, colors, etc. Moving higher up the list of reasons to use RMarkdown, we find the value of avoiding thinking about formatting too early in the process. This lowers the likelihood of errors created in switching between these tools (something we may be loath to admit we’ve done, but, really, who hasn’t?). No longer do you do your data wrangling and analysis in SPSS, your data visualization work in Excel, and your reporting writing in Word - now you do it all in RMarkdown. In my experience, the most convincing reason for newcomers to consider RMarkdown is that you avoid switching between multiple tools. Why is RMarkdown valuable? I've come to see its benefits on a continuum, from simple (doing your current work better) to more complex (doing your work in new ways).
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