Today I Learned -

Word similarity

R

duckdb

Suppose you have been asked with comparing or joining two…

Get back to where you came from - dealing with cross-references in Microsoft Word

Word

If you’re writing in Microsoft Word you have probably used cross-references before, and occasionally you want to see where a previously-written cross-reference will take you.

Break pipeline execution in R

with breakerofchains

R

RStudio

Suppose you have a tidyverse-style pipeline and you want to check out an intermediate output (eg, find the input to the ggplot below).

Generate pptx slides from R

R

The awesome R package officer has tools to connect R to Office documents. You can use it to generate a PowerPoint document from R.

Geocoding addresses in R

The tidygeocoder package

R

If you need to geocode addresses (ie, get the longitude and latitude from an address), I’ve had great luck with the tidygeocoder package:

Adding total facets to a `ggplot`

facet_grid + margins

R

ggplot2

Sometimes you want to use facets (or small multiples) to show something about individual groups in the data - but if you want to also have a…

Scrape table from webpage using R

R

RStudio

Here’s a snippet for scraping a table from a webpage. Copy the URL (or enter it after) and execute the snippet¹ with scrape Shift Tab.

`git pull` with Github Actions

Easy deployment

git

github

If you want a remote server to git pull changes to your Github repo, add this workflow (and the relevant secrets) to the repo:

Opening external files from R

Go on, have a browse

R

Sometimes you want to check out a link that you generate in an R script, or perhaps open a table of outputs that you’ve just saved as a csv.

Stop PowerPoint from resizing text

Because sometimes you just want to do it yourself

PowerPoint

If you’re getting frustrated because PowerPoint keeps resizing your text, but you’d like to keep a consistent size, just Format Shape and choose ‘Do not Autofit’:

Running many regressions in R

With map and broom

R

If you’re in a situation where you have a lot of parameters and want to run regressions on many subsets of a dataset based on those parameters, one option is to pmap:

Combine multiple words into a single string in R

Oxford commas are optional

R

If you’ve got a vector of words that you want to combine with a different separator for the last pair of words (eg, you want to use ‘and’), just use knitr::combine_words()

Starting your R scripts in a common way

Keeping it consistent

R

RStudio

I always find it useful to start my R scripts in a consistent way, and in RStudio I have a snippet for this.

Easier cross-references in Microsoft Word

Word

If you have ever been frustrated by how long it takes to create a cross-reference in Microsoft Word, Traveler4 on GitHub has the macro for you.

Keyboard shortcuts in Microsoft Word

Speed up your workflows

Word

If you need to assign a new keyboard shortcut in Microsoft Word:

Running an R script with Github actions

Daily data refresh

git

R

Github

If you want to run an R script every n days, use the below workflow file. Pop it in .github/actions and Bob’s your uncle. You might need to enable write…

Showing git branch in R terminal

Adding to your .Rprofile

git

R

RStudio

If you want to show your current git branch while using RStudio, like this: