R Tutorial: Anatomy of a flexdashboard

Want to learn more? Take the full course at https://learn.datacamp.com/courses/building-dashboards-with-flexdashboard at your own pace. More than a video, you'll learn hands-on coding & quickly apply skills to your daily work. --- Now we're going to talk about the basics of how a flexdashboard is put together. The little piece of magic that turns R Markdown into a flexdashboard is in the header. Every R Markdown file starts with a header, and the key part for us is the output line. If you’ve used R Markdown before, you may have noticed that the output was set to html_document, or perhaps pdf_document. This option determines how everything in your R Markdown file is interpreted, and what type of output is produced when you knit the document. So you might have guessed how we make our R Markdown file become a flexdashboard: we change the output type to flex_dashboard. You’ll usually see this as output: flexdashboard::flex_dashboard, which makes it extra clear that this output option comes with the flexdashboard R package. With this option set, your R Markdown file will be interpreted as flexdashboard syntax. A flexdashboard is made of charts. Every chart fills one box in the dashboard layout. The way to indicate a chart in your R Markdown file is with a triple pound sign. Everything below one of these and above the next will be included in a single chart. Usually this is a single R chunk, but it can also include text. The title of the chart can be included on the same line as the triple pound sign. Charts are arranged in columns. Every chart is in exactly one column, but a column can contain multiple charts. You can create a dashboard without specifying columns, and all charts will stack up in a single column by default. However, usually you’ll want to specify the columns directly. Columns are created using a series of 14 or more dashes in flexdashboard syntax. All charts between one column header and the next will be laid out in that column. You can add a name