eurostatRTool

The eurostatRTool is an R package developed by Eurostat, offering a robust and flexible environment for the visualisation and analysis of economic indicators. With eurostatRTool, users can create customisable HTML dashboards that display a wide range of indicators through various visualisation types, including time series plots, bar charts, and maps. The package enables users to customise the overall layout, update underlying data, and select specific visualisation modes and interpretative texts to feature in the dashboard. This flexibility makes it easy to tailor the tool to specific needs, ensuring that the visualised data is both meaningful and accessible for viewers.

A standout feature of eurostatRTool is the storyboard layout from Flexdashboard that organises information into a sequence of slides. This layout allows to present a step-by-step narrative, providing readers with a more comprehensive understanding of the data. The user-friendly navigation enables viewers to move back and forth through the data story at their own pace, fostering a more interactive and engaging data exploration.

Installation

For Windows users: install Rtools

For installing R packages from source on Windows, users also need to install Rtools, which provides the necessary tools for building R packages.

1. Download: go to the Rtools download page and download the appropriate version of Rtools.

2. Install: run the downloaded installer and follow the installation instructions. Make sure to select the option to modify the system PATH during installation.

Install devtools package in R

Open R or RStudio and install the devtools package from CRAN:

install.packages("devtools")

Install R package from source

Now, you can use devtools::install_github() or devtools::install() to install R packages directly from GitHub or other sources. Specifically, the eurostatRTool package can be installed from GitHub by running:

devtools::install_github("eurostat/eurostatRTool")

The following packages are required: configr, dplyr, DT, flexdashboard, htmltools, leaflet, lubridate, magick, magrittr, mapview, metathis, plotly, rmarkdown, shiny, shinydashboard, sp, tidyr, utils and xlsx.

Setting up an renv environment for this project is recommended but not mandatory. For more information, you should consult the Wiki pages for this project.

Getting started

The eurostatRTool package requires some learning to be used properly. Below we provide a basic example which shows you how to generate a general dashboard in a given output folder:

library(eurostatRTool)
eurostatRTool::generate_dashboard("path/to/output/folder")

Further help and documentation

For general help with the eurostatRTool package, you should consult the Wiki pages for this project or reffer to the package’s documentation. After instalation you can access detailed information on individual functions by using ?function_name and explore comrehensive guides through the vignettes by running utils::browseVignettes("eurostatRTool").

If you have any further questions, please send them to [email protected].