Slides from a talk given at the R-Ladies NYC meetup on 2018-11-06.

(Lovely Gustave Doré Engraving from "The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha" - 1863.)

Resources and references

• R packages by David Gohel: officer, rvg, flextable, mschart, worded (in development as of 2018-11-06)
• ArchieML, the New York Times' flexible markup for a Google Docs --> Structured Data workflow, and my R parser for it.

Some code snippets demo'd

Reducing Round-trips: Making an editable Powerpoint Graphic from R with rvg

library(officer)
library(rvg)
library(tidyverse)  # ggplot and pipes

# Make a plot
my_ggplot <-
  ggplot(mtcars, aes(mpg, wt)) +
  geom_point(col = "red", size = 4) +
  labs(x = "Fuel efficiency (mpg)", y = "Weight (tons)",
       title = "Seminal ggplot2 scatterplot example",
       subtitle = "A plot that is only useful for demonstration purposes",
       caption = "Brought to you by the letter 'g'")

# Take a look
my_ggplot

# Draw it using office vector graphics
read_pptx() %>%    # Start with a blank PPT when no arg is given
  add_slide(layout = "Title and Content", master = "Office Theme") %>%
  ph_with_text("Vector graphics, nice.", type = "title") %>%
  ph_with_vg(ggobj = my_ggplot) %>%
  print("my_slide.pptx")

Shortening the journey: Post-processing a knitted word document

library(officer)
library(magrittr)
library(rmarkdown)

# Create a new rmarkdown output format to use
doc_enhanced <- function(...) {
  # Start with an existing format, modify defaults and pass on other args
  out <- rmarkdown::word_document(reference_doc = "template.docx", ...)

  # Add function that will modify the output after the fact
  out$post_processor <- function(metadata, input_file, output_file, clean, verbose) {
    
    
    doc <- read_docx("template.docx") %>%  # Re-use the template
      body_add_docx(output_file) %>%       # Pour the output into it
      body_replace_img_at_bkm(             # Add annotations at bookmarks
        bookmark = "logo",
        value = external_img(src = "sidebar.png", width = 1.77, height = 6.031))
    print(doc, output_file)
    return(output_file)                   # Return the path of the modified file
  }
  return(out)
}

# Now use this format to render
rmarkdown::render("word_doc.Rmd", output_format = doc_enhanced())