• AARUG Co-Organizer
• Data Engineering/Science consultant
• R & data nerd
• Too opinionated and pedantic for my own good

• Super easy, especially with RStudio
• Start a new document, press "Knit", done!
• Still the appropriate workflow for a majority of use cases; no need to get fancy

• What if you have an R script, but want a nice report with minimal effort?
• In Rstudio: File > Compile Notebook (gotta have .R file selected)
• Turns a totally unspecial R script into a pretty decent looking file
• Uses knitr::spin underneath (as well as other things)

• You can use some weird comments to make an R file pretend to be an Rmd
• Seriously, look at this mess: https://github.com/yihui/knitr/blob/master/inst/examples/knitr-spin.R
• If you find yourself doing this, why not use Rmd??

• knitr::stitch: another option for turning R into HTML (or whatever)
• Probably want stitch_rmd most of the time
• Kinda ugly by default

• Use rmarkdown::render to get the same effect as "Compile Notebook"
• (as long as you avoided those awful spin-style comments)
• Works on .R, .Rmd, .md

• By default, render will see all variables in calling environment
• Run it inside of a function on an Rmd, where the document refers to variable defined outside the document
• Great for generating dynamic reports with new data
• Con: hard to know which variables a document expects in calling environment

• Use a template to get nice defaults
• If someone else wrote one, makes it easy to format according to their standard
• Distributed in packages (high barrier to making your own)
• Rstudio comes with some; the nice default is itself a template
• Checkout rticles for some cool ones

• Knitr is a deep pool of wonder and terror
• read_chunk…
• I'll be sticking to Rstudio & rmarkdown::render
• K.I.S.S

How do you use RMarkdown?