The basics

Let's begin with starting RStudio and opening a new file (File --> New File --> R Markdown). If you're using Conda you should have all the packages needed, but install anything that RStudio prompts you to. In the window that opens, select Document and HTML (which should be the default), and click Ok. This will open a template R Markdown document for you. On the top is a so called YAML header:

---
title: "Untitled"
output:
    html_document:
        toc: true
---

Here we can specify settings for the document, like the title and the output format.

• Change the title to My first R Markdown document

Now, read through the rest of the template R Markdown document to get a feeling for the format. As you can see, there are essentially three types of components in an R Markdown document:

1. Text (written in R Markdown)
2. Code chunks (written in R or another supported language)
3. The YAML header

Let's dig deeper into each of these in the following sections! But first, just to get the flavor for things to come: press the little Knit-button located at the top of the text editor panel in RStudio. This will prompt you to save the Rmd file (do that), and generate the output file (an HTML file in this case). It will also open up a preview of this file for you.