Recently, dashboards have become a common means of communicating the results of data analysis, especially of real-time data, and with good reason: dashboards present information attractively, use space efficently, and offer eye-catching visualizations that make it easy to consume information at a glance. Traditionally, however, dashboards have been difficult to construct using tools readily available to R users, and so are built by a separate engineering team if they're built at all. In this talk, we present a new package, $\pkg{flexdashboard}$, which empowers R users to build fully-functioning dashboards. To make this possible, $\pkg{flexdashboard}$ leverages two existing packages: $\pkg{R Markdown}$ and $\pkg{Shiny}$. $\pkg{R Markdown}$ provides a means to describe the dashboard's content and layout using simple text constructs; and, optionally, $\pkg{Shiny}$ enables interactivity among components and allows the full analytic power of R to be used at runtime. The talk will focus on the practical steps involved in setting up a dashboard using $\pkg{flexdashboard}$, including: Building space-filling layouts using declarative R Markdown directives; Using dashboard components, such as tables, value boxes, charts, and more; Constructing multi-page dashboards for the presentation of larger or more detailed results; and Adding interactivity using Shiny.
