Spin Class: No Sweat Reports in R

If you use R, there’s a decent chance you are already familiar with using Rmarkdown files and the knitr package to create reports documenting your analyses. A lesser known but equally useful function distributed with the knitr package is spin, which gives you the power of Rmarkdown directly from an R script. This is especially powerful when creating quick, memorandum-style documents which may be heavy on analysis but light on text. The power of spin lies in making it easy to interleave code, output, and text including all the bells and whistles of Rmarkdown but without the extra work of writing a separate Rmd file.

In this workshop, I’ll discuss the basics of spin and its relationship to Rmarkdown and then provide participants with hands-on experience spinning up elegant, reproducible, analytic reports.