Chapter 13 Exporting and reporting

Without data, you are just another person with an opinion.
W. Edwards Deming

The results of any data analysis are meaningless if they are not effectively communicated.

This may be as a journal article or presentation, or perhaps a regular report or webpage. In Chapter 13 we emphasise another of the major strengths of R - the ease with which HTML (a web page), PDF, or Word documents can be generated.

The purpose of this chapter is to focus on the details of how to get your exported tables, plots and documents looking exactly the way you want them. There are many customisations that can be used, and we will only touch on a few of these.

We will generate a report using data already familiar to you from this book. It will contain two tables - a demographics table and a regression table - and a plot. We will use the colon_s data from the finalfit package. What follows is for demonstration purposes and is not meant to illustrate model building. For the purposes of the demonstration, we will ask, does a particular characteristic of a colon cancer (e.g., cancer differentiation) predict 5-year survival?