R Projects For Dummies

Chapter 5

Dashboards — How Dashing!

IN THIS CHAPTER

Introducing shinydashboard

Exploring dashboard layouts

Creating a dashboard

Adashboard is a collection of graphics that make it easy for a user to access and understand information. Think about the dashboard in a car: It shows how fast the car is moving, how much gas is in the tank, the temperature, and a number of other pieces of information that help a driver understand the state of a car at any moment.

In this chapter, I show you how to use R to create dashboards that show multiple pieces of information about data.

The shinydashboard Package

In Chapter 4, I introduce you to shiny, a package for creating interactive applications in R. Like shiny, the shinydashboard package is a creation of the same folks who brought us RStudio. As its name indicates, it has all the elements of shiny (like user interface, server, and reactivity), and you use it to create dashboards. If, as you work with this package, you get the idea that a dashboard is a shiny app on steroids, you've pretty much got it.

Here’s what I mean. Figure 5-1 shows a dashboard I created in shinydashboard. It shows a random sample from a uniform distribution with values ...