Working with reports
Tiger Tang · 2026
Reports are among the most visible and high-impact outputs of data work. This chapter demonstrates how to produce reproducible, customizable, and professional reports in R across HTML dashboards, Excel workbooks, Word documents, PDFs, and presentation slides. It begins with practical report structures and a standard reporting workflow, then introduces reusable templates and parameterized documents that scale across regions, time frames, and stakeholder needs without rebuilding the analysis. The chapter is organized by output format. It covers HTML reporting with R Markdown and flexdashboard (including interactive widgets and automated rendering); Excel automation with openxlsx (reading, updating, formatting, and embedding plots); Word generation and document updates with officer; PDF generation and extraction using R Markdown, LaTeX, and pdftools; and presentation automation with officer for PowerPoint, with a brief introduction to HTML slide generation using R Markdown and Quarto. By the end of the chapter, you will be able to design polished, repeatable reporting pipelines that eliminate manual formatting, maintain branding consistency, and integrate cleanly into end-to-end automation workflows.