rstudio::conf 2022 Workshop

Getting Started with Quarto

by Tom Mock

Tip

If you are a workshop attendee - please clone https://github.com/jthomasmock/quarto-workshop.git via RStudio on Monday morning (July 25th).

Please go to the workshop homepage for full instructions: https://rstudio-conf-2022.github.io/get-started-quarto/

🗓️ July 25 and 26, 2022
⏰ 09:00 - 17:00
🏨 Maryland 2
✍️ rstd.io/get-started-quarto

Pre-Work

If you are a workshop attendee and have any trouble with installation locally, please reach out to me directly!

  • Install latest version of RStudio, v2022.07.0-548 or later
  • Install latest version of Quarto (v1.0.36 or greater)
  • After installing Quarto, open the terminal in RStudio and:
    • See this guide for details on using the terminal
    • Install/Update TinyTeX for PDFs with quarto install tool tinytex
    • Install/Update Chromium with quarto install tool chromium
  • Ideally upgrade/use to R 4.1 or R 4.2 (I’m showing base R pipe as |>)
  • Install these R packages:
pkg_list <- c(
  "tidyverse", "gt", "gtExtras", "reactable", "ggiraph", "here", "quarto",
  "rmarkdown", "gtsummary", "palmerpenguins", "fs", "skimr"
  )
install.packages(pkg_list)
Workshop Materials

On Monday July 25th - clone this repo in RStudio! https://github.com/jthomasmock/quarto-workshop.git

  1. Navigate to https://github.com/jthomasmock/quarto-workshop

  2. Click on the green “Code” button and copy the url under the HTTPS tab https://github.com/jthomasmock/quarto-workshop.git

  3. In RStudio, use File > New Project > Version Control > From Git > and then paste the URL into the source repo box and then click enter!

This will be a R/RStudio centric course based on the attendees, but we will briefly cover other editors and Python. You are not required to install Jupyter/Python/VScode, but if you’d like to test them out:

Overview

This workshop is designed for those who have no or little prior experience with R Markdown and who want to learn Quarto. Quarto is the next generation of RMarkdown for publishing, including dynamic and static documents and multi-lingual programming language support. With Quarto you can create documents, books, presentations, blogs or other online resources.

In this 2 day workshop you will learn about the Quarto format for technical communication and computation. We’ll teach you how to get started creating and fully customizing Quarto outputs (HTML, PDF, Presentations) and the use of RStudio’s Visual Editor which provides a user interface for editing all of Pandoc markdown.

We will also provide an overview of Quarto’s developer tooling support in alternative tools such as Jupyter, VS Code, and any text editors depending on learner interest.

We will briefly cover how to generate robust tables/plots in Quarto. Lastly, we will cover Quarto Projects for aggregating many files such as complex web sites or entire books.

Learning objectives

  • Understand the difference between knitr, R Markdown, and Quarto
  • Utilize RStudio, knitr, and Quarto to generate static documents, websites/blogs, and presentations
  • Expand learner’s toolkit regarding markdown, CSS, and Quarto-native layout options

These materials are developed for a trainer-led workshop at rstudio::conf 2022, but should be useful for self-guided learning as well.

Is this course for me?

This two-day workshop is primarily intended as a broad overview of Quarto as the next generation of RMarkdown. You should take this workshop if you have experience programming in R and want to learn how to take advantage of Quarto for literate data science programming in academia, science, and industry.

This workshop will be appropriate for attendees who answer yes to these questions:

  • Have you programmed in R and want to better encapsulate your code, documentation, and outputs in a cohesive “data product”?

  • Do you want to learn about the next generation of RMarkdown for data science?

  • Do you want to have a better interactive experience when writing technical or scientific documents with literate programming?

Prework

If you are a workshop attendee and have any trouble with installation locally, please reach out to me directly!

  • Install latest version of RStudio, v2022.07.0-548 or later
  • Install latest version of Quarto (v1.0.36 or greater)
  • After installing Quarto, open the terminal in RStudio:
    • The terminal is located in the tab next to the R console pane in RStudio
    • Install/Update TinyTeX for PDFs with quarto install tool tinytex
    • Install/Update Chromium with quarto install tool chromium
  • Ideally upgrade/use to R 4.1 or R 4.2 (I’m showing base R pipe as |>)
  • Install these R packages:
pkg_list <- c(
  "tidyverse", "gt", "gtExtras", "reactable", "ggiraph", "here", "quarto",
  "rmarkdown", "gtsummary", "palmerpenguins", "fs", "skimr"
  )
install.packages(pkg_list)
Workshop Materials

On Monday morning July 25th - clone/pull this repo (to get latest version)! https://github.com/jthomasmock/quarto-workshop.git

Schedule

Day 1

Time Activity
09:00 - 10:30 Understanding magic with Quarto
10:30 - 11:00 Coffee break
11:00 - 12:30 Authoring with Markdown and more
12:30 - 13:30 Lunch break
13:30 - 15:00 Computation and Editors
15:00 - 15:30 Coffee break
15:30 - 17:00 Static reports and documents

Day 2

Time Activity
09:00 - 10:30 Presentations
10:30 - 11:00 Coffee break
11:00 - 12:30 Websites
12:30 - 13:30 Lunch break
13:30 - 15:00 Advanced plots, tables, and more
15:00 - 15:30 Coffee break
15:30 - 16:00 Going further with Quarto + knitr
16:00 - 16:30 Q/A with Quarto Dev team
16:30 - 17:00 Going further with Quarto + knitr

Instructor

Tom Mock, PhD is the Customer Enablement Lead at RStudio, helping RStudio’s customers be as successful as possible. He is deeply involved in the global data science community, sharing tips on #RStats Twitter (find him at @thomas_mock), as co-founder of #TidyTuesday, a weekly Data Science learning challenge, and presenting on various Data Science topics on YouTube or at conferences.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.