Scripts only let you write code and comments. Notebooks let you write code and text – headers, paragraphs, etc. – in the same document. By default they render into an easy-to-read HTML document.
Notebooks always have the .Rmd extension (e.g., notebook.Rmd.)
“File -> New File -> R Notebook”. A demo notebook will pop up. Delete the demo text and code and start writing/coding!
There are three parts to a notebook:
You can then render the notebook to an HTML file.
The stuff at the top in between the ---. The default is:
---
title: "R Notebook"
output: html_notebook
---You can change the title and add an author:
---
title: "My title"
author: "First Last"
output: html_notebook
---and that suffices for a basic notebook. For more options see the Markdown checkpoint.
Write plain text in Markdown.
Code gets entered in “chunks” – the highlight boxes with “fences” (three open and closed backticks).
Click on “Preview notebook” to see the rendered HTML document.
Every time you change the file and save it, the document will re-render.
All notebooks are saved with .Rmd extension. After you render the notebook, in your files you will see a new file with the extension .nb.html. So iff your notebook is called notebook.Rmd, the rendered file is called notebook.nb.html.
R Notebooks are part of a much bigger document ecosystem driven by R Markdown.
R Markdown lets you turn the same document into a HTML, Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, or PDF.
Learn more at the official R Markdown site and the definitive guide.
Here is the notebook rendered (or “knitted”) to a Word file: