R Markdown Reproducible Reporting Template
A project of WellPower’s Innovation Week 2019 - creating a template R Markdown report to be used by the evalution and research team to prepare quarterly and annual program reports
Background
WellPower (formerly the Mental Health Center of Denver) hosts an Innovation Week within the Information Systems department each year. This is a week where the department takes a pause from regular projects and focused resources on innovative, proof of concept projects with the aim to bring them into production by the end of the week. In 2019, I pitched a project to recruit department members to support me in developing a template R Markdown file to be used by any of my evaluation and research team colleagues.
I was the first staff person at WellPower to use R Markdown for reproducible, semi-automated reporting beginning in early 2019. However, I had not had the opportunity to dig into the full power of this tool. I used Innovation Week to build a more sustainable approach to using R Markdown and to teach my evaluation and research team colleagues how to use the template.
Timeline
One week in November 2019
Main Activities
- Learn about package development in R
- Simplify an existing R Markdown report used for an existing program’s annual reporting
- Annotate this existing R Markdown file with descriptions of the YAML header, file setup, code chunks, inline code, report sections, and commenting
Tools Created
- Custom CSS with organization’s branding and style guidance to apply to all reports
- R package to be used as a template when opening a new R Markdown file from the R Studio GUI
- R Markdown example