8.1 What is R Markdown

R Markdown provides an authoring framework for data science. You can use a single R Markdown file to both

• save and execute code, and

• generate high quality reports that can be shared with an audience.

R Markdown was designed for easier reproducibility, since both the computing code and narratives are in the same document, and results are automatically generated from the source code. R Markdown supports dozens of static and dynamic/interactive output formats like word, pdf, powerpoint and more!

To use Rmarkdown you need the rmarkdown package, but you don’t need to explicitly install it or load it, as RStudio automatically does both when needed.