Create Powerpoint presentations from R with the OfficeR package

For many of us data scientists, whatever the tools we use to conduct research or perform an analysis, our superiors are going to want the results as a Microsoft Office document. Most likely it's a Word document or a PowerPoint presentation, and it probably has to follow corporate branding guidelines to boot. The OfficeR package, by David Gohel, addresses this problem by allowing you to take a Word or PowerPoint template and programmatically insert text, tables and charts generated by R into the template to create a complete document. (The OfficeR package also represents a leap forward from the similar ReporteRs package: it's faster, and no longer has a dependency on a Java installation.)

At his blog, Len Kiefer takes the OfficeR package through its paces, demonstrating how to create a PowerPoint deck using R. The process is pretty simple:

• Create a template PowerPoint presentation to host the slides. You can use the Slide Master mode in PowerPoint to customize the style of the slides you will create using R, and you can use all of PowerPoint's features to control layout, select fonts and colors, and include images like logos. 
• For each slide you wish to create, you can either reference a template slide included in your base presentation, or add a new slide based on one of your custom layouts.
• For each slide, you will reference one or more placeholders (regions where content goes) in the layout using their unique names. You can then use R functions to fill them with text, hyperlinks, tables or images. The formatting of each will be controlled by the formatting you specified within PowerPoint.

Len used this process to convert the content of a blog post on housing inventory into the PowerPoint deck you see embedded below.

You can find details of how to create Microsoft Office documents in the OfficeR vignette on PowerPoint documents, and a there's a similar guide for Word documents, too. Or just take a look at the blog post linked before for a worked example.

Len Kiefer: Crafting a PowerPoint Presentation with R

Comments

[Susan Buchman]

I recently gave a talk on using the combo of officer, rvg, and mschart packages for a local R meetup -- great solution to a long-standing problem. Really appreciate David Gohel's work.

[Mike Stanley]

I'm not a big fan of how this post capitalises the package name in the title - since package names are case-sensitive, they should be cased as they are on CRAN to avoid misleading.