Collaborating on R Markdown documents with non-R users

[mfherman]

I've been using Distill more and more for creating HTML reports and documents with interactive features that I can easily share as email attachments/links, etc., and I really love it! One challenge that I'm running into (and this is certainly not specific to the Distill format) is easily collaborating with non-R users on these documents. For the most part, the collaboration would consist of edits to the text and comments and ideally be achieved in Word.

The R Markdown Cookbook discusses the redoc package as a possible solution: https://bookdown.org/yihui/rmarkdown-cookbook/word-redoc.html. Although the package appears to not be in active development at this time.

I'd love to hear any ideas or workflows that others have had success with for this type of collaboration/editing as I'm sure I'm not alone with this stumbling block to using more R Markdown in my work!

[kaijabean]

I don't think this is what you're looking for, but have you tried convincing non-R users to use the new RMarkdown visual editor?

I realize that some people may just never be R users, plain and simple, and there needs to be a solution for that. But I've found that if I can get people convinced that all they need to do is install RStudio and open one document I've sent them, they tend to be open to it. And since the visual editor doesn't look like code (it looks more like a word document!), it can be a lot less intimidating.

That said, I'll be curious to hear how/whether others have dealt with this when collaborating with people who just don't or won't use R at all.

[mfherman]

Thanks, @kaijabean! I do think the new visual editor is a really good way to get into R Markdown for some users. But in my case, I'm thinking about completely non-technical folks where this wouldn't be an option.

[kaijabean]

Yeah, that's what I figured. Unfortunately I don't know of a good way to do this. I hope someone else chimes in, because that would be useful info for me as well!