Getting Started with Shiny Online Workshop

What is Shiny?

Shiny is a package that allows R users to create interactive and dynamic web-based applications, without requiring an understanding of HTML, CSS or JavaScript. If you can code something in the R language, you can create an app for it.
 

What benefits does Shiny offer?

Shiny allows you to quickly and easily:

• implement a new algorithm or techniques in day-to-day business,
• visualise, explore and monitor data in real time for various requirements,
• process data in-field to aid preliminary observations,
• speed up turnaround time for results,
• give untrained stakeholders the ability to analyse and communicate complex results to others.
   

What does this workshop cover?

This workshop will give you the ability to create an interactive application that can be used by people with minimal computing knowledge, along with the skills to continue learning and building more complex Shiny apps.
 

Who is this workshop for?

Any R users can benefit from this workshop. This workshop is for people who are writing a thesis and want to create an application to demonstrate a process, to those whose day-to-day job is data exploration and testing, or those whose bosses only use Excel. Shiny allows not only the sharing of results, but the sharing of the methodology used to create results without specialist training.
 

Prerequisite skills for this workshop

If you have a basic familiarity with R, then you can complete this workshop. The workshop will cover the following Shiny principles:

• Loading a dataset into Shiny
• Using tidyverse and base R commands to manipulate the data within a Shiny app
• Creating interactive output like plots and tables
• Downloading output from the Shiny app

NB: You will not be required to have an understanding of specific R functions or packages for this workshop, other than general R skills.
 

Why should I attend this workshop?

While there are many great tutorials on the internet, nothing is better than someone sitting you down and showing you step-by-step the essential pieces of information to start the process. Weeks of internet research and trial-and-error can be condensed into a single workshop. This workshop is being hosted by someone who made mistake after mistake, so you don't have to. There is a core understanding of Shiny, that once explained makes things straight forward. Once some of the fundamental functions and their behaviour are explained, the rest of Shiny becomes far more understandable.

If you have further questions about this workshop, please contact the Biometry Training team.