By Riddhiman








(This article was first published on Modern Data » R, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers)

R-Markdown is a great way to create dynamic documents with embedded chunks of R code. The document is self contained and fully reproducible which makes it very easy to share. This post will be the first in a multi part series on how to embed Plotly graphs in R-Markdown documents as well as presentations.
R-Markdown is a flavor of markdown which allows R-users to embed R code into a markdown document. The document is then ‘knit’ using knitr to create a HTML file.
Getting started

• We’ll use R-Studio to create our R-Markdown document. You can download it here ->http://www.rstudio.com/products/rstudio/download/
  
• Next we’ll install a few packages just to ensure we have everything we need to get started.
  
  

# Not run# install.packages('rmarkdown')# install.packages('plotly')

• Note: you can download the function definition forGetYahooData() here
• Now we should be good to go…
  

Creating a R-Markdown document

• Click on File -> New File -> R Markdown as shown below.
  
• You should now see a dialog as shown below. Select ‘Document’ in the left panel and fill in title and author field and hit ‘OK’.
  
  

• You should now have a document which looks like this –
  

Code chunksTo embed R code into the document, code needs to be inserted as shown below.


Inserting a Plotly graphInserting an awesome interactive Plotly chart is as simple as printing out the plotly object in a code chunk. Use the code snippet below.
source("Yahoo Stock Data Pull.R")AAPL <-  GetYahooData("AAPL")IBM <- GetYahooData("IBM")# Plotly chart library(plotly)mat <-  data.frame(Date = AAPL$Date,                    AAPL = round(AAPL$Adj.Close,2),                   IBM = round(IBM$Adj.Close,2))p <- mat %>%   plot_ly(x = Date, y = AAPL, fill = "tozeroy", name = "Microsoft") %>%   add_trace(y = IBM, fill = "tonexty", name = "IBM") %>%   layout(title = "Stock Prices",          xaxis = list(title = "Time"),         yaxis = list(title = "Stock Prices"))p  # Thats it !
Knitting the R-Markdown documentNow that our R-Markdown document is complete with text, code and graphs, we can go ahead and click the little ‘Knit HTML’ button to generate a HTML file.

We now have a nicely formatted HTML file !