In my job, I spend a good amount of time working in the platform setup by our survey vendor, Qualtrics. There are some pre-formatted reports that we can send on a recurring basis through Qualtrics, but for one-off or custom reports, I can work with the raw data in R. A few weeks ago, however, I was asked to setup a recurring email to send a customized report to a group of hospital directors each week. While R makes generating the report simple, sending out each week was tedious, as each one needed to be sent separately. Since the reports contain patient information, I couldn’t automate via a third party server like GitHub Actions. I needed a way to localize the automation to my computer.
Luckily enough, I was able to work out a solution! I wrote about it in a submission to RStudio’s 2021 Call for Documentation. You can read my article on Automated Email Reports with R, VBA, and the Task Scheduler for more detail.
Some programming notes
- I’ve been named one of RStudio Community’s New Users of the Month!
- I’ve started working in Rmarkdown for these posts (you can actually view the native file for this post here). This allows me to mix in code and prose in one document & should make the process a bit easier on my end.
- I’ve scheduled out posts every two weeks for the rest of the year. I wanted to give myself enough time to work on some longer term projects, so be on the lookout for more in store!
Citation
@online{rieke2021,
author = {Rieke, Mark},
title = {RStudio’s {Call} for {Documentation}},
date = {2021-10-05},
url = {https://www.thedatadiary.net/posts/2021-10-05-rstudio-s-call-for-documentation},
langid = {en}
}