What is markdown?
Markdown is a markup language for creating formatted text using a plain-text editor [1].
What is R Markdown?
R Markdown is a file format for making nice documents with R. An R Markdown document is written in markdown and contains chunks of R code [2].
R Markdown is an open-source tool for creating reproducible reports in R. It enables you to keep all code, results, plots, and text in one place. It is particularly useful when you want to create a document where your results/analysis are more essential to the document/audience than the code [3].
R is used widely for statistical analysis, data visualization, and data manipulation, especially for handling complex datasets and running intricate statistical computations [5]. Because of this, R Markdown is really useful because it can be used for data analysis, collaboration, and communicating results [4]. It supports other programming languages besides R, like Python and SQL [9].
rmarkdown :: Cheatsheet has some really useful syntax tips, chunk options, workflow suggestions.
Examples:
Using R Markdown you can export your document to other formats (e.g. PDF, Microsoft Word, a slideshow, HTML) [4].
Some examples and applications can be found here [6,7] and here [8]. Like this R Markdown PDF and its code.
How to begin…
If you’re trying to use R Markdown outside of RStudio then you’ll have to install it first, you can use:
‘’
install.packages(“rmarkdown”)
library (rmarkdown)
“
If you are using RStudio, you do not have to install R Markdown, you can just click File>New File>R Markdown in the RStudio taskbar to produce a new R Markdown document [9]. It should look like this:
Now, you’re well on your way to producing a sophisticated, shareable, easy-to-read document.
Other resources and guides:
Shiny – Introduction to interactive documents
R Markdown: The Definitive Guide
Sources:
[2] Introduction to R Markdown
[3] Getting Started with R Markdown — Guide and Cheatsheet – Dataquest
[4] Getting Started with R Markdown — Guide and Cheatsheet | R-bloggers
[5] What’s the R programming language used for? – GeeksforGeeks
[7] Gallery
[8] 2.1 Example applications | R Markdown: The Definitive Guide
