28Jul 2020 by Andrew Treadway
How to create PowerPoint reports with R

How to create PowerPoint reports with R

File Manipulation, R
In my last post, we discussed how to create and read Word files with R's officer package. This article will expand on officer by showing how we can use it to create PowerPoint reports. Getting started Let's get started by loading officer. Next, we'll create a PowerPoint object in R using the read_pptx function. To add a slide, we use the add_slide function. The first slide we'll create is the title slide. We specify the type of slide in the layout parameter. There's several other possibilities here including "Title and Content", "Blank", "Title Only", "Comparison", "Two Content", and "Section Header". Secondly, we use ph_with to add the title text. Next, let's add another slide. This time we'll have a title and content. How to add tables Now, what if we…
Read More
18Dec 2018 by Andrew Treadway

How to change a file’s last modified date with R

File Manipulation, R
This relatively quick post goes through how to change a file's last modified date with base R. How to change a file's modified time with R Let's say we have a file, test.txt. What if we want to change the last modified date of the file (let's suppose the file's not that important)? Let's say, for instance, we want to make a file have a last modified date back in the 1980's. We can do that with one line of code. First, let's use file.info to check the current modified date of some file called test.txt. We can see above by looking at mtime that this file was last modified December 4th, 2018. Now, we can use a function called Sys.setFileTime to change the modified date to any date including…
Read More
10Dec 2018 by Andrew Treadway
10 R functions for Linux commands and vice-versa

10 R functions for Linux commands and vice-versa

File Manipulation, R, System Administration
This post will go through 10 different Linux commands and their R alternatives. If you're interested in learning more R functions for working with files like some of those below, also check out this post. How to list all the files in a directory Linux R What does it do? ls list.files() Lists all the files in a directory ls -R list.files(recursive = TRUE) Recursively lists all the files in a directory and all sub-directories ls | grep "something" list.files(pattern = "something") Lists all the files in a directory containing the regex "something" R Linux Getting the top records in a file / object Linux R What does it do? head head() Prints the top n records of a file (Linux) / data frame or other object (R) R Linux…
Read More
11Jul 2018 by Andrew Treadway
R: How to create, delete, move, and more with files

R: How to create, delete, move, and more with files

File Manipulation, R, System Administration
Though Python is usually thought of over R for doing system administration tasks, R is actually quite useful in this regard. In this post we're going to talk about using R to create, delete, move, and obtain information on files. How to get and change the current working directory Before working with files, it's usually a good idea to first know what directory you're working in. The working directory is the folder that any files you create or refer to without explicitly spelling out the full path fall within. In R, you can figure this out with the getwd function. To change this directory, you can use the aptly named setwd function. Creating Files and Directories A new folder, or directory, can be created in R using the dir.create function,…
Read More