mages' blog

In many cases Word is still the preferred file format for collaboration in the office. Yet, it is often a challenge to work with it, not so much because of the software, but how it is used and abused. Thanks to Markdown it is no longer painful to include mathematical notations and R output into Word.


I have been using R Markdown for a while now and have grown very fond of it. Although I am quite happy with PDF and HTML output for basic reports and to switch to Sweave/LaTeX for more complex documents, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the new version of RStudio can produce MS Word files directly from R Markdown as well; thanks to the power of pandoc. Perhaps Word is an option after all?

After last week's kerfuffle I hope the roll out of googleVis version 0.3.2 will be smooth. To test the water I release this version into the wild here and if it doesn't get shot down in the next days, then I shall try to upload it to CRAN. I am mindful of the CRAN policy, so please get in touch or add comments below if you find any show stoppers.

So what's new in googleVis 0.3.2?

The default behaviour of the functions print.gvis and plot.gvis can be set via options().

Now this doesn't sound too exciting but it can be tremendously helpful when you write Markdown files for knitr. Here is why: