R Tutorial: Building Dashboards with flexdashboard

Want to learn more? Take the full course at https://learn.datacamp.com/courses/building-dashboards-with-flexdashboard at your own pace. More than a video, you'll learn hands-on coding & quickly apply skills to your daily work. --- Thank you for joining this course on making dashboards with flexdashboard. I'm excited to share with you the power and simplicity of the flexdashboard package. To be successful, it will be helpful to have some experience with R and a basic understanding of R Markdown. By the end of the course, you will have the skills to create your own professional quality dashboard from scratch. What exactly is a dashboard? A dashboard is a collection of components arranged into a single visual display. The elements of a dashboard can be a wide variety of things, from single value displays to graphs to maps to tables to text to custom widgets. A dashboard is a great way to give many people access to the same information in one visually appealing place. We've talked about dashboards, now let's talk about flexdashboard in particular. Flexdashboard is an R package that allows you to use R Markdown to create a dashboard-style output. It handles the task of laying out a dashboard in HTML, so you can focus on the content. The really important thing about the flexdashboard package is that it allows you to use all the power of R to create content for your dashboard. Also, if you need a truly interactive dashboard, you can combine Shiny with flexdashboard to build reactive elements. This course will teach you how to create your own dashboard. We'll go over the most common components and how to lay them out into a single display. We'll also cover what you can do using R Markdown alone, and the additional capability you can add by combining flexdashboard with Shiny. By the end of the course, you'll be able to create a dashboard from scratch, decide whether you need Shiny for your dashboard, and understand the ways the dashboard can be extended to meet your nee