R Tutorial: Anatomy of a flexdashboard

Key Takeaways

now we're going to talk about the basics of how a Flex dashboard is put together the little piece of magic that turns our markdown into a Flex dashboard is in the header every our markdown file starts with a header and the key part for us is the output line if you've used our 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 our 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 our markdown file become a Flex dashboard we change the output type to flex underscore dashboard you'll usually see this as output : Flex dashboard double colon flex underscore dashboard which makes it extra clear that this output option comes with a Flex dashboard our package with this option set your our markdown file will be interpreted as Flex dashboard syntax a Flex dashboard 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 Flex dashboard syntax all charts between one column header and the next will be laid out in that column you can add a name for the column and options which we'll talk about later on the line above the dashes but the name will not here anywhere in your dashboard a specific name might be helpful for you or just column will suffice you can create a flex dashboard template in our studio by choosing file new file our markdown then from template flex dashboard and okay if you have at least one chart and the appropriate output in the header all you have to do is knit and you'll have a dashboard for this course we'll be using a publicly available data set from a bike share service in the San Francisco area it has records for all bike trips taken from station to station with locations and times you'll see this data appear in many of the exercises time to put this into practice