Series

ggplot2 Series

This series contains a great deal of tips, tricks and packages that you can use to level up your ggplot game.

Web Development for R

This series is about all the web development tools and techniques that you can use to enhance your R projects.

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File Management With The {fs} Package

We go through common file system operations using the {fs} package

Mar 30, 2025
3 min

The difference between = and <- finally explained

Let’s figure out what the difference between R’s assignment operators is.

Mar 16, 2025
3 min

data.table vs dplyr: A Side-by-Side Comparison

We go through common data cleaning operations with both dplyr and data.table.

Mar 9, 2025
11 min

5 Levels of Data Wrangling Every R User Must Master

We progress from simple to highly advanced {dplyr} techniques.

Feb 16, 2025
8 min

Sending e-mails with {blastula}

We send out mails from within R using the {blastula} package.

Jan 19, 2025
3 min

Comparing pipes: Base-R |> vs {magrittr} %>%

We compare the R native pipe and the {magrittr} pipe.

Jan 12, 2025
4 min

Getting started with SQL with R

In this blog post, I show you how to work with databases in R

Oct 5, 2024
9 min

Creating fancy interactive tables using Internet data with rvest and reactable

In this blog post, I show you how to web-scrape data from the Internet using {rvest} and then I’ll show you how to create an elaborate table with {reactable}

Sep 1, 2024
55 min

Creating interactive tables with reactable

Today I’m showing you how to create a nice interactive tables with the reactable package

Aug 18, 2024
16 min

An R User’s Guide to Other Programming Languages

This blog post is a collection of resources that I find helpful for learning other programming languages from the perspective of someone who comes from the R world. Some of these resources are mine. Some are blog posts that I found online.

Aug 13, 2024
4 min

Calendar Plots With ggplot2

Today I’m showing you ggplot techniques to create calendar plots in no time.

Aug 4, 2024
12 min

Text Styling With ggplot2

Today I’m showing you ggplot techniques that give you full control over your texts. This includes dynamic text colors (depending on the background) and customizations using the brand-new marquee package.

Jul 21, 2024
9 min

Quick dataViz techniques for nicer line charts with ggplot

Today I’m showing you a couple of quick ggplot techniques that you can apply to quickly make your line charts nicer

Jul 7, 2024
10 min

How to avoid empty line charts

Today we’re finding out what goes wrong then ggplot can plot the lines that we want to plot.

Jun 30, 2024
12 min

Master Data Cleaning & Get To Insights Faster

This blog post announces my data cleaning Master Class

Jun 18, 2024
3 min

The 6 Most Fundamental Functions for Data Cleaning with R

In this blog post, I’m explaing the most fundamental building blocks for data cleaning in the Tidyverse.

Jun 16, 2024
9 min

Why you shouldn’t use boxplots

In this blog post, I explain why it’s not a great idea to rely too heavily on box plots.

Jun 9, 2024
17 min

RStudio Shortcuts and Settings

I often get asked about RStudio settings. So that’s why I’ve decided to share my settings and all of my favorite RStudio tricks.

Jun 2, 2024
3 min

Easy data cleaning with the janitor package

I demonstrate a couple of functions from the janitor package I find quite useful

May 26, 2024
7 min

How to create interactive country maps with R.

Visualization

In this blog post, I show you how to create interactive maps with ggplot.

May 19, 2024
10 min

Create engaging tables with R or Python using {gt}

This blog post is two posts in one. I’m showing you how to create engaging tables with R and Python through a unified interface.

Apr 28, 2024
25 min

WebDev4R: Understanding Quarto Notation

WebDev

The Quarto syntax can be confusing. Until you realize that it just mimics HTML & CSS.

Apr 11, 2024
4 min

Three Ways to Include Images in Your ggplots

Visualization

In this blog post, I show you three ways to include image files into your ggplot2 plots

Apr 7, 2024
8 min

WebDev4R: CSS Grid

WebDev

There are two major systems in CSS for aligning things. These are flexbox and grid. Both of them are really useful to know. In this blog post, I’ll show you how grid works.

Apr 4, 2024
11 min

Creating upset charts with ggplot2

Visualization

In this blog post, I show you how to create upset charts with ggplot2

Mar 24, 2024
11 min

WebDev4R: Flexbox

WebDev

There’s two major systems in CSS for aligning things. These are flexbox and grid. Both of them are really useful to know. In this blog post, I’ll show you how flexbox works.

Mar 21, 2024
17 min

Processing PDF documents with R and AI models using tidychatmodels

AI

With AI it’s pretty simple to summarize PDFs and extract information from it. In this tutorial, I show you how that works with tidychatmodels.

Mar 17, 2024
11 min

WebDev4R: CSS Selection

WebDev

We cannot always rely on writing the CSS code from scratch. Sometimes, we need to select elements from the existing source code and apply styles to them. I’ll show you how to do this with CSS selection.

Mar 14, 2024
12 min

Introducing tidychatmodels for communicating with AI chatbots

AI

I introduce tidychatmodels which is a package I built to communicate with AI chatbots via a common interface.

Mar 10, 2024
11 min

WebDev4R: Using HTML & CSS with {htmltools}

WebDev

Getting Started with CSS is really easy. All you need is a set of CSS keywords and a basic understanding of how to use them. I’ll show you how to get started.

Mar 7, 2024
30 min

WebDev4R: The Ultimate Guide To Get Data Through APIs With {httr2} and R

WebDev

The {httr2} package is an incredible package that gives you an excellent workflow to get data via Web APIs.

Mar 3, 2024
23 min

WebDev4R: Meet the Web Inspector

WebDev

Your web browsers inspect tool is a phenomenal way to look behind the curtains of your favorite websites and see what HTML & CSS is. I’ll show you how to navigate this tool.

Feb 29, 2024
8 min

WebDev4R: Introducing WebDev for R Series

WebDev

I’m creating a new WebDev for R series. This is the first post of the series and I explain goals and intentions.

Feb 28, 2024
2 min

How to create diverging bar plots

Visualization

In this blog post, we are going to recreate a beautiful diverging bar plot from the PEW Research Center.

Feb 25, 2024
22 min

WebDev4R: Creating a weather app

WebDev

We create what looks like a weather app with {htmltools}

Feb 18, 2024
52 min

Dot plots as an alternative to bar charts

Visualization

Bar charts are great for comparing categories. But dot plots put more emphasis on individual data points. In this blog post, I show you how to create such an alternative plot with ggplot2.

Feb 11, 2024
9 min

Correlation heat maps with {ggplot2}

Visualization

I show you how to create a correlation heat map with {ggplot2}, how to avoid using the wrong colors and how to use some nice variations of standard heat maps.

Feb 4, 2024
21 min

Combining maps and patterns with {ggplot2}

Visualization

In this video I show you how you can create a map of the US with patterns inside of state borders.

Jan 28, 2024
8 min

Interactive filters in tables with reactable

Tables
JavaScript

reactable is a great package to make interactive tables in R. And you can make your tables even more interactive by combining them with a tiny bit of JavaScript.

Jan 21, 2024
9 min

6 Common ggplot2 Mistakes

Visualization

Here’s a list of some beginner’s mistakes when it comes to ggplot (and how to avoid them)

Jan 14, 2024
8 min

5 Powerful ggplot2 Extensions

Visualization

ggplot2 is powerful on its own but there are some extensions that make ggplot2 even better. In this blog post, I show you some of the best extensions.

Jan 7, 2024
8 min

5 Example Charts with ggplot2

Visualization

ggplot2 is an incredibly powerful tool to create great charts with R. But it can be hard to keep all the moving parts in mind in the beginning. So, it helps to have a few examples to get started. In this blog post I show you how to create the most common chart types with ggplot2.

Dec 17, 2023
17 min

Style your code output with {epoxy}

The new epoxy package makes it dead-simple to format text outputs. In this blog post, I show you how that works.

Dec 12, 2023
10 min

The Ultimate Guide to Get Started With ggplot2

Visualization

ggplot2 is an incredibly powerful tool to create great charts with R. But it has a bit of a learning curve. This tutorial shows you everything you need to know to get started with ggplot

Nov 22, 2023
41 min

Four reasons to learn HTML + CSS as an R programmer

Webdev

With HTML + CSS you can unfold the full potential of many popular R tools. We explore some of these use cases today.

Jul 16, 2023
5 min

Creating interactive visualizations with {ggiraph} (with or without Shiny)

Shiny
Interactive Plots
Visualization

It is really simple to turn a ggplot into an interactive visualization. In this blog post you’ll learn how to do that with {ggiraph}. Also we’ll explore ways to enhance the interactivity with Shiny.

Feb 23, 2023
23 min

How to enhance your Shiny apps with JavaScript (JS) without knowing much JS

Shiny
JavaScript

Every now and then I need JavaScript to enhance my Shiny apps. But I don’t actually know much about JS. In this blog post, I show you how I still make JS stuff work.

Dec 1, 2022
13 min

Bar plot checklist

Visualization

Bar charts are easy to make but hard to perfect. Let’s create a small checklist to make things easier.

Nov 21, 2022
7 min

Alternatives to paired bar charts

Visualization

We take a look at a couple alternatives to paired bar charts.

Oct 22, 2022
13 min

The ultimate beginner’s guide to generalized linear models (GLMs)

Statistics
ML

This is an beginner’s guide on GLMs. We cover the mathematical foundations as well as how to implement GLMs with R. The implementations are done with and without {tidymodels}.

Aug 12, 2022
19 min

Forget regular heat maps. Use bubbles on a grid!

Visualization

We explore alternatives for heat maps to take sample sizes into account.

Aug 10, 2022
8 min

Alternative ways to visualize correlations

Visualization

We explore alternative correlation matrix plots.

Aug 1, 2022
7 min

5 hidden gems from gg-packages to level up your dataviz game

Visualization

This blog post is a quick one. It highlights a few hidden gems (functions) from well-known or not so well-known packages.

Jul 27, 2022
11 min

The ultimate guide to starting a Quarto blog

This blog post is an in-depth guide on how to start blogging with Quarto.

Jul 24, 2022
41 min

How to embed a Shiny app into your blog posts

Shiny
Shorts

This is a one-minute blog post to share how to incorporate Shiny apps in blog posts.

May 9, 2022
1 min

Use {lubridate} and {rtweet} to analyze your Twitter timeline

Visualization
API

We take a quick look at the rtweet and lubridate package. These help you to analyse your Twitter timeline. And they helped me to visualize my follower count as I reached 1000 followers this week.

May 6, 2022
9 min

Storytelling in ggplot using rounded rectangles

Visualization

We build rebuild a ‘Storytelling with Data’ plot which uses rounded rectangles. I’ll show you an easy and a hard way to make rectangles round.

May 4, 2022
19 min

6 Lessons that I learned from teaching R to non-programmers

Opinion

I held a short workshop teaching R to Economics students. Here are six things that I wish I had known in advance.

Apr 15, 2022
12 min

How to collect dataviz from Twitter into your note-taking system

Automation
API

The goal is to send a tweet’s URL to a dummy mail account and let R extract it, call the Twitter API and then put everything as a Markdown file into your note-taking system.

Apr 14, 2022
21 min

Recreating the Storytelling with Data look with ggplot

Visualization

We try to imitate the Storytelling with Data look with ggplot

Mar 29, 2022
19 min

How to use functional programming for ggplot

Visualization
Functional Programming

Functional programming is a mighty sword. Today, we use it to avoid tedious repetitions when things go wrong in ggplot.

Mar 25, 2022
7 min

How to use Fonts and Icons in ggplot

Visualization

This is a short tutorial on how to import fonts and icons in R using the showtext package.

Mar 4, 2022
7 min

4 Ways to use colors in ggplot more efficiently

Visualization

Inspired by a datawrapper blogpost, we explore how to work with fewer colors in ggplot.

Feb 19, 2022
13 min

Interactive ggplots, user feedback, and a little bit of Javascript magic with Shiny

Shiny

Here’s how I turned a ggplot interactive using Shiny and what else I learned while building that app

Jan 17, 2022
11 min

ggplot-tips: Learning by Thieving

Visualization
Opinion

I advocate to take part in the TidyTuesday events to learn with and from others.

Jan 10, 2022
4 min

A couple of visualizations from ggforce

Visualization

The ggplot2-tips series is continued with a few example plots from the ggforce package

Dec 31, 2021
9 min

6 simple Shiny things I have learned from creating a somewhat small app

Shiny

I recently built a small Shiny app. Here are 6 things I learned doing that. Maybe a Shiny beginner will find something useful in here.

Dec 9, 2021
15 min

ggplot tips: Arranging plots

Visualization

The patchwork and ggforce packages can be used to compose plots from multiple subplots. Let’s have a look at how that works.

Oct 28, 2021
9 min

An Exploratory Introduction to the Plotly Package

Visualization
Exploratory Intro

We try to do a few simple things with the plotly package in order to figure out how it works.

Oct 16, 2021
13 min

Did German Voters Become More Impulsive?

We try to find out if voters in Germany became more impulsive over time.

Oct 3, 2021
14 min

Writing Versatile Functions with R

Functional Programming

Using concepts like dot-dot-dot and curly-curly we create functions that are more versatile and can be used in multiple settings.

Sep 16, 2021
12 min

ggplot tips: Using position_stack() for Individual Positioning

Visualization

We take a look at the differences between position = ‘stack’ and position = position_stack().

Sep 11, 2021
4 min

ggplot tips: Assigning Labels to an Aesthetic

Visualization

We talk about how to easily create labels for an aesthetic.

Aug 19, 2021
6 min

Beginning a ggplot2 Series: Logarithmize Your Scales

Visualization

This is the beginning of a series about a few ggplot2 tricks I picked up along the way. In this first installment we talk about how logarithmizing scales can be beneficial.

Aug 7, 2021
6 min

Is Success Luck or Hard Work?

Simulation

I recreate a simulation study on the influence of luck on success compared to the influence of skill.

Jul 28, 2021
18 min

Animating kernel density estimators

For my first post I create an animation using the animate package.

Jul 14, 2021
10 min
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