Making Reports in R

Andy Wills

Wordprocessors

Don’t screenshot or cut-and-paste graphs from RStudio Online into your word processor, because the end result looks very unprofessional. If you’re using a word processor to write a report, do this instead:

1. Export your graph, using the Export icon on RStudio’s Plots window, and selecting “Save as image…”. Give it a meaningful file name (e.g. “dom-scatter”) and click ‘Save’.

2. Click on the ‘Files’ tab in RStudio Online, and click the tick box to select your file (it will have whatever filename you just gave it.).

3. Click on “More” (next to the little blue gear wheel), and then “Export…”.

4. Click “Download”. The file will now be in the Downloads folder of your computer.

5. Now, you can insert the downloaded image file into your word processor document – see this how-to for LibreOffice, or this video tutorial for Word.

RMarkdown

Alternatively, you can make reports with RStudio. This has many advantages over using a word processor such as Word, or LibreOffice, but we don’t cover it in this introductory course. If you’d like to read more about how to write reports with RStudio, see Just Enough R.