googledrive-to-rmd-example

A brief example showing one way to integrate Google docs and Rmd to make reports, etc. This particular example is built to knit to Word. I like this approach for situations where I am either working with a large group of collaborators (thus making Markdown collab straight on GitHub a little clunky), or working on a product with collaborators who have a range of different skills, including folks who don't regularly use GitHub.

If I did this right, you should be able to clone this repo, run googledrive::drive_auth() in the R console, and knit the "MainDocument.Rmd" file to make a full document.

Usually, I organize things into folders, like R/ and markdown/, but for this example I put everything in one folder so it's all out in the open! I recommend organizing your files if you're making a report like this for real.

Note! This is just one way you can draw text and R code into the same knitted Markdown document. Other ways include using the Trackdown package, and if you're working in Quarto, the cool Quarto commenting interface (thanks Josh London!).

🌱 Update: See this repo for an example of a parameterized report where you can generate repetitive chapters for a series of species or stocks. The repo provides both a Quarto and a Markdown solution.

Packages needed

You'll need the following packages. Copy and paste the code below to get them all installed.

list.of.packages <- c("googledrive", "knitr", "rmarkdown", "officedown", "officer", "pandoc")

new.packages <- list.of.packages[!(list.of.packages %in% installed.packages()[,"Package"])]
if(length(new.packages)) install.packages(new.packages)

Workflow

This set of scripts works by a stepwise process:

1. Download files from google docs and convert them to .Rmd
2. Knit the .Rmd to Word

At the end, you will have a Word doc that you have compiled straight from R. Cool, huh!!

Entry points for folks who aren't set up for RStudio/git/Markdown

There are many "entry points" where you can collaborate with people on different parts of the report. Here are some options for where people from your team can contribute. These will all work pretty harmoniously in terms of the editing/knitting report generation process (i.e., they won't jam up the gears when you're trying to test creation of the final report):

• editing text in Google docs
• editing citations in cite/bibliography.bib (can edit in browser on github). They can use zbib.org to get the BibTeX version of any citation. Or if they want to add several at once, export them from a Zotero or Mendeley library and save as (or paste into) bibliography.bib
• creating tables as text or figures as any image format (these can be imported using read.csv() and knitr::include_graphics() in your R code chunks)

Google drive folder access

Anyone with a NOAA email should have access to this Google Drive folder containing chunks of text to be integrated into the final report.

Do you have questions or hot tips?

Or if something isn't working... please leave an issue above.