Create Professional Reports in Excel using R and XLSX

While R is the real workhorse of data analysis and modeling, if you want to share the results of your work with other people your probably going to send it in a spreadsheet. Luckily the xlsx package for R makes it easy to export simple spreadsheets and also has advanced functionality to create workbooks with professional design and formatting.

Scheduling R scripts to run automatically in Windows

A key component in data acquisition or reporting is the ability to trigger your script to run at a set time each day. Whether you are attempting to download the latest stock prices or update corporate earnings reports, once you’ve created the script to do the actual work, you need to find a way for it to be run on the correct schedule.

Advanced email in R: embedding images and markdown

Previously we looked at how you can combine R and Markdown to create reports directly from your R scripts, and also how to send email from R using Microsoft Outlook. In this post, we’ll take these concepts a step further and look at how we can use R to embed images in email messages or even use Markdown to create entire messages.

Sending email from Outlook in R

When setting up automated reporting workflows, a key component is distributing the report to the various stakeholders so they can review it.  One useful technique is to send a “push notification” by email to alert everyone that a report or analysis task has just been completed.  Luckily, it isn’t hard to send out email from R by using Microsoft Outlook.