What’s New in R: October 20, 2025
Welcome to this week’s edition of What’s New in R! This week, we’re featuring a comprehensive book on creating beautiful Quarto slides, a practical analysis of car ownership data, and a tutorial on cleaning messy data with fuzzy matching. Let’s dive in!
Slidecrafting
Emil Hvitfeldt’s comprehensive book on creating beautiful slides with reveal.js in Quarto offers a wealth of techniques to help your presentations stand out from the default Quarto templates. The book covers everything from customizing colors and fonts to advanced styling with SCSS, creating custom fragments, and implementing interactive elements. Whether you’re looking to make minor tweaks or completely transform your slide deck’s appearance, this resource provides practical guidance for crafting visually striking presentations.
How many cars are there in Madison?
Harald Kliems presents an engaging analysis of car ownership trends in Madison, Wisconsin, using American Community Survey data from 2006 to 2024. While the focus is on car ownership patterns, the post serves as an excellent example of how to conduct exploratory data analysis and create clear visualizations in R. The code demonstrates practical applications of {tidycensus}, {dplyr}, and {ggplot2}, making it a valuable resource for anyone looking to see what a complete data analysis workflow looks like, regardless of the subject matter.
Easily clean up messy databases with fuzzy matching in R
Lucia Walinchus demonstrates how to use fuzzy matching techniques to clean inconsistent text data in R. Using the 2025 IRE conference schedule as an example, the tutorial shows how to identify and group similar entries that differ due to typos, extra spaces, or formatting variations. The post covers practical techniques for setting matching thresholds, visualizing results, and validating your matches—skills that are valuable for any data cleaning task, not just database work.
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Got any ideas for resources I should feature in future issues of What’s New in R? Leave a comment below!
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