In my last post I shared a template that I use for all of my work. I realized there was a section that I didn’t go into that that could be very important for someone in the future.

Take my job for example. I use to create reports for people on a weekly basis. It could be about company performance or web metrics, advertising reports, etc. A lot of it could be viewed as ‘grunt work’ because just about anyone can do it.

In essence you’re looking at a table of data and reporting that numbers either increased or decreased. Granted there’s a lot more to it than that and we would spend the majority of our time answering the “Why did this happen?” question.

I only wrote reports for a while before I began thinking about how I could automate something like this.

For example, you might see a sentence like “Revenue for the week of 2017-01-01 was 500,000. It increased by 25% from the previous year.”

There are parts of that sentence that can easily be written to change automatically, let’s take a look: “Revenue for the week of w was x. It y by z% from the previous year.” We could easily write the code to replace the values “w, x, y, z.”

dataPercent <- round(
  (sum(data$revenue) - sum(dataPrior$revenue))
  /sum(dataPrior$revenue) * 100, 2)

  dataResult <- if (dataPercent > 0){
    paste(
      "increased by ", round(dataPercent),
      "% from the previous year.", sep="")
  } else {
    paste(
      "decreased by ", -round(dataPercent),
      "% from the previous year.", sep="")
  }  

print(paste("Revenue for the week of ", min(data$date),
" was $", sum(data$revenue), "It ", dataResult, ", sep = ""))

Can you see how easy that is?? We’re not even really doing something complicated yet! So far:

1. We’re calculating the percent change from one time period to the next
2. We’ve created an if statement for the revenue change. If it increases, print this, else print something different.
3. We’ve also calculated the minimum date using the min() function.
4. We’ve also calculated revenue using the sum feature.

Now, whenever we run this report, we will get a familiar result with all of the proper data without having to rewrite half of our analysis. There is so much more that you can do, so I encourage you to go out and explore and share what you come up with.

I should mention that this isn’t a new idea. Web developers have been doing this with code for a long time, but in the world of analysis, this is kind of a new way of thinking for some.