Is Rshiny what i need?

[Jolijndhr]

Hi! I'm new to R and all of its tools, but really eager to learn. However, i'm still doubting whether R and R shiny are the right choice for me.

I'm a researcher, used to SPSS, but as we have a lot of recurring research every year i'd like to include this in dashboards instead of pdfs like we've been doing forever. The point of the dashboards would be to share them with our clients and let them interact with the data themselves. I think learning R will be valuable, and R shiny might be the tool that I need to publish the data in the dashboarding that I am looking for. We are a non commercial enterprise so budget is limited, which makes R, being open source, even more attractive.

I'm looking to create a page like this:

Do you think R and Rshiny are the right tools for me? I'm willing to take courses and have budget to do that.

Thanks in advance!

[andresrcs]

Shiny can be used to create interactive dashboards for sure but since you are planning to deploy this in "production" you will also need to take IT considerations into account, is your IT department familiar with the R/Shiny ecosystem? Shiny apps are not static content, they require server side responses from an R session.

[michaelmayer]

I feel that Shiny could definitely meet your requirements. And as you rightly point out - software cost is pretty much zero but you will invest time and resources in training and education to provide such dynamic dashboards.

To get started with your explorations, you could even test/host some apps/dashboards on shinyapps.io.

In order to see what is possible, a good place to start is the Shiny - Gallery.

Once you are getting close to production-ready dashboards, you then can work with your local IT department to build a Rshiny environment where you can safely expose your data used in the dashboard. Again, Rshiny is free but you also could look into going towards RStudio Connect as a platform to host all those dashboards (https://support.rstudio.com/hc/en-us/articles/217240558-What-is-the-difference-between-RStudio-Connect-and-shinyapps-io-)