Overview

The following tutorial will guide you through the development of an Rmarkdown document. This will be the format of your final exam.

Note: This document is in progress, and will be completed following the in-class tutorial

Step 1: Running your analysis

The easiest way to complete the document is to first prepare a normal R script file and run all analyses required to complete your project. Compiling an Rmarkdown file can be more cumbersome if there are errors in your code. After you have a complete analysis, you can copy/paste all your commands into the Rmarkdown script and make the appropriate changes to have a fully formatted html file.

Step 2: Install rmdformats

You will need a package to create the html documents. Run this command in your console in the bottom left window of Rstudio (not in your script file):

install.packages("rmdformats")

Step 3: Open an Rmarkdown document

Open a new script file, but be sure to select the correct one. It can be found at File -> New file -> R Markdown.

When opening the document, it will prompt you to enter a bunch of information and will create some text for you to use as a template. I prefer to delete all of this and start from scratch.

Step 4: Header and opening commands

The header is considerably different from a traditional script file, as this will contain all the information for the template of your choice, and all formatting commands. Here is a basic header you can copy/paste into your document:

---
title: 'Advanced Economic Methods'
subtitle: 'Final exam'
author: "Your Name"
date: "`r Sys.Date()`"
output:
  rmdformats::downcute
---

Notice that the title and subtitle should be in single quotation marks, and the author and date are double quotation marks. The command “`r Sys.Date()`” will extract the current date from your computer and enter it into the document. You can also choose a fixed date (e.g. "20.11.25"), but I prefer the system date so I can keep track of when I last modified my work.

The output here uses the downcute format, but I encourage you to explore different templates and choose one that you prefer. You can find a gallery of templates here

There are plenty of additional options that you can experiment with. I personally recommend using self-contained: true to bundle everything into a single document, and you can explore the highlight function to change the color of the code text. Options include:

• tango
• pygments
• kate
• monochrome
• espresso
• zenburn
• haddock
• breezedark
• haskell

---
title: 'Advanced Economic Methods'
subtitle: 'Final exam'
author: "Your Name"
date: "`r Sys.Date()`"
output:
  rmdformats::downcute:
    self_contained: true
    highlight: tango
---