1 Introduction

Agricultural educators and extension researchers developing decision-making tools for farmers have long embraced spreadsheet environments like Microsoft Excel. Spreadsheet tools can be useful to assist farmers in financial planning, returns on investment, cost-benefit analysis, production, and market risk assessment etc. To some audiences, unfortunately, spreadsheet tools can be intimidating or difficult to navigate. One way to address this issue is to convert spreadsheet tools into interactive, online applications for increased accessibility and user experience, especially through utilizing state-of-the-art user-interface designs, data analytics presentations, and interactive features.

This project provides a practical, introductory guide for converting spreadsheet tools into to online applications using programming language R via the Shiny package. R and Shiny are free, and the third-party online service for hosting Shiny applications is extremely low-cost in most situations.

Download the whole material.

Overview

  • R is free & extensive variety of packages available
  • R code \(\rightarrow\) interactive webpage
  • No knowledge on HTML/CSS/JavaScript needed
  • Requirements
    • R
    • some basic knowledge of R coding
    • (Recommended) Rstudio
    • R packages: shiny

Objectives

  • Provide a quick introduction of shiny
  • Share tips, example codes, and additional resources
  • Initiate a community of decision-tool developers working with shiny