The great thing about R Markdown are the code chunks. I would suggest taking a look at it if you have a requirement to switch between the page orientations. However, I personally use the developmental officedown package to modify page orientation on the fly. There isn’t an officially endorsed method of changing Word document page orientation from portrait to landscape and vice versa using the rmarkdown package. I have also added a artificial heading level (Level 6) to act as a page break in the Word document. Notice that the reference_docx refers to an external Word document that contains all the pre-determined styles for paragraphs, headings, captions etc. We have essentially now set up the look for our front page. The abstract is used as almost a nice summary for the front page of your business reportĭefinitely use the reference_docx option to source a Word document template to apply organisational styles, if any Use the current date so you don’t need to manually type it in In this case, we’re going to prepare a **Word document* as per the output: word_document option. You can set up which document format you will be rendering the document as. It can provide consistency of layouts and structures, improved efficiency in producing standard reports and allow you to work in the one environment.Ĭonfiguring the YAML header will produce the first page of your Microsoft Word document. R Markdown (with the right workflow) can be powerful in automating reports for the right situation. You might be more comfortable with the conventional approach of building plots in Excel, copying and pasting those plots into a Word document and then finalising it for your audience. But … we need to remember that it’s simply another tool for producing reports. In all these cases, these reports were compiled with (almost) the press of a button. Rendering a HTML-based interactive report on analysis of specific cohorts Standardising a PowerPoint presentation containing key metrics for executives Producing evaluation report for an intervention in Microsoft Word Preparing a consultancy findings pack in Microsoft Word To illustrate, here are some of the cases that I’ve used R Markdown for business purposes: This is nifty when your audience prefers additional commentary to accompany your findings in your report. Not only that but it can be integrated in a workflow that picks up your assembled R code for generating analyses, figures, tables etc to incorporate them seamlessly into your chosen document. R Markdown is essentially a framework and a file format that allows users to produce (not limted to) HTML documents and Word documents. R Markdown can immensely help with building high quality publications for business reporting. The term reproducibility seems to be associated with research publications and dashboard design and development but can be equally applied to the reporting activities that business professionals undertake to provide information to stakeholders. It then becomes even more imperative to have low-/no-cost tools (R is open-source, by the way!) that can efficiently generate reports for a variety of stakeholders. There may also not be a business case to justify such costs. Many organisations especially those that do not have the budget (e.g. non-profit) to roll out commercial reporting products such as Power BI or Tableau. R is renowned for its reproducibility due to using the same code to manage and automate processes for analysing and communicating data. This is where R Markdown is a favourite tool of mine for automating reports in the form of documents and designing polished reports in a business context.īusiness report reproducibility using R Markdown There are some specific use cases where dashboards are suitable for a user group(s) that can happily interrogate the data for themselves. The modern day business professional will still need to rely on traditional reporting such as creating documents containing key findings and recommendations that cannot be feasibly replaced by a dashboard. For example, I will still need to write up analyses that will be sent to executives and managers in documents. Realistically, not all reporting in organisations are automated via the use of these business intelligence (BI) tools. It occurred to me that, yes, large-scale reporting tools such as Tableau and Power BI that are amazing at producing self-service dashboards but organisations still rely on conventional reporting methods through the means of creating documents presenting findings from analyses. While I have developed and published interactive dashboards on my website, I started thinking about the practicalities of creating dashboards for business reporting only.
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