AI & Analytics Workshops
Creating Data Dashboards in R
In this installment of the R workshop series, you’ll follow dashboard principles to create an interactive data dashboard in R using Quarto (Quarto, 2025). Data dashboards are useful in many different areas for overviewing complex data and displaying key trends and metrics.
Learn how to build a dynamic data dashboard in R following dashboard principles, firstly displaying data dictionary and exploratory information and finally displaying an analysis for an example project.
To access the project files and follow along, click here.
1. Dashboard set-up
Firstly, walk through key data dashboard principles such as building dashboard content to address a question of interest, providing enough context that the dashboard can stand alone, tailoring its content to the primary audience, and building clear data visualizations. It’s important to define a specific business need for your dashboard to target.
Then walk through the basics of data dashboard set-up in R using Quarto markdown document structure.
- File > New File
- Quarto Document
From there, you can customize your dashboard by choosing preset themes on Quarto’s Dashboard theming website, or create your own.
2. Build informational and descriptive statistics pages
In this example dashboard, examine simulated grocery store shopping data for a fictional store created by WAIAI senior data analyst Russ Walters and senior fellow Eric Eisenstein. Learn how the basics of data dashboard building by starting with appendix-style pages such as a data dictionary and overview text boxes. Create pages for exploratory, interactive data visualizations and tables for shopping and customer data that might provide your audience useful context.
3. Create deliverables in Quarto
Finish the workshop by creating the key page in the data dashboard displaying analytic results geared towards your audience, including dynamic visualizations and informational text boxes to spell out insights clearly. As a bonus, briefly learn how to use Quarto to create PowerPoints as an alternative presentation format.
Wrap up this workshop with the information you need to build a clear, sophisticated data dashboard in R for your next big project.
In other R workshop series videos, learn about 3 things you didn’t know you could do in R, basic text analysis in R, and interactive data visualization in R.
By Ginny Ulichney, PhD, Research Analyst at Wharton AI and Analytics Initiative
A few tricks can take data dashboards to the next level:
- Focus information towards your question of interest and audience: draw focus to key takeaways and information as related to the key project priorities and audience your dashboard is intended to speak to.
- Provide all needed context: data dashboards should be usable for your audience without further explanation, so be sure to include any necessary information about the data or visualizations shown that the viewer should know.
- Prioritize clear data visualizations: As a key dashboard component, data visualizations should be clear: they should draw viewers’ attention to important takeaways while including necessary nuance and representing data accurately.