R Tutorial: Dashboard structure overview

Want to learn more? Take the full course at https://campus.datacamp.com/courses/building-dashboards-with-shinydashboard at your own pace. More than a video, you'll learn hands-on coding & quickly apply skills to your daily work. --- I am Lucy D'Agostino McGowan. I work in biostatistics and originally learned R specifically to meet my statistical needs, but since then I've learned a lot about R's strength to help communicate data and results, specifically via shiny and shinydashboard. These tools are so powerful both for visualizing and communicating various steps in the data science pipeline. For this first section, you are first going to learn about the Shiny Dashboard structure. I'll go over the different components, and then you'll be able to give it a whirl. The UI, user interface, of a Shiny Dashboard is comprised of three main parts: the header, the sidebar, and the body. Here is an empty dashboard. The blue bar on the top is the header, the dark blue portion on the left is the sidebar, and the gray portion in the center is the body. The header is edited using the dashboardHeader() function. Take a minute to notice here how the function is in camel case, by which I mean you can tell when there is a new word because it is capitalized (the H in header) and looks like a hump on a camel! This is common syntax throughout the shinydashboard ecosystem. So, the dashboard header is created using the dashboardHeader() function, similarly the dashboardSidebar() and dashboardBody() functions edit the sidebar and the body. You can combine these three pieces using the dashboardPage() function to make the UI, the user interface. We can then use this UI along with an empty server function with shiny's shinyApp() function to spin up an empty dashboard. Now you can give it a try. You'll build a dashboard for NASA's International Space Station. #RTutorial #Dashboard #structure #shinydashboard #R #DataCamp