R Markdown Interactive Reports

Intro

After recently finishing a few confidential reports for clients interested in understanding more about their data and programs, I decided to make up some data and bring together some of the more interesting analysis and visualization methods from that work into a report that I could share publicly to demonstrate my skills.

For this demonstration, I pretend the client (“Acme Corp”) is an national organization and the use case is that they’re interested in analyzing how their employees are engaging with the company volunteer program. There are a number of different ways that employees can use the company-sponsored volunteer hours, and the company would like to understand how the program is being utilized.

Goal

This report demonstrates my abilities across the following:

• Uncovering business insights via analysis at a variety of angles, e.g. temporal, spatial, and aggregating data at different levels.

• Communicating results clearly, both in writing and through effective data visualizations.

• Using R Markdown to develop dynamic reports that are useful, beautiful, and intuitive.

And uses the following approaches and tricks in R Markdown:

• A floating table of contents and intuitive headings to make the report user-friendly and easily navigable.

• Additional css stylesheets and HTML to enhance the report with custom images, graphics, icons, and also adjust other stylings like font size, color, and type.

• Custom plot theming in ggplot to create a consistent, unified visual language.

• Using the datatable package to create an interactive table even within a static html output file.