Publish Your Work: How to Share Your ggplot2 Graphic

🧐 The Problem

After going through this course, you’ve probably built a solid foundation in data visualization and ggplot2, and even created some nice graphs along the way.

But those graphs aren’t very useful sitting alone on your laptop. It’s time to think about sharing them with the world.

Maybe you want to include your charts in a larger document in your company, use them in a scientific publication, share them on social media, or add them to slides for a presentation.

Whatever the case, you need a way to build, store, and share your work that meets a few key requirements:

•  Safe  — your code is stored on the cloud so you never lose it.
•  Transparent  — your code and methods can be inspected and verified by others.
•  Reproducible  — you, and anyone else, can reuse your code easily to adjust them to similar use cases or run it with the latest data.
•  Clean  — your project is easy for readers to understand and looks professional.

🚀 The Solution

1️⃣ Quarto for Reports

The first tool we recommend is Quarto.

It brings your R or Python code, explanations, and results together in one clean, reproducible document.

You write a .qmd file like the one below, click run, and Quarto produces a polished report with your analysis.

ScriptResult

It is incredibly quick to learn. Yan has written a short guide that walks you through the steps in under 3 minutes. If you want to level up and create standout reports, he has also compiled a solid collection of tips and tricks.

2️⃣ Git and GitHub for Storage and Version Control

Git helps you track every change in your project.

Each time you reach a good stopping point, you create a commit. These commits act like checkpoints, so you can return to any earlier state whenever you need.

Then GitHub works hand in hand with Git.

Github is a website where you store your code, keep it safe, and make your commit history easy to browse. Others can read your work, open issues, leave comments, and collaborate.

It is not only practical, it is also a core element of your identity as a developer and a real asset on the job market. Here is what a GitHub profile looks like:

Git and GitHub can do a lot, and the range of features can feel overwhelming when you start.

The good news is that you only need a small portion of these features to cover almost everything you will do: track your changes and store your code safely online.

3️⃣ Make It Public

Once your Quarto report is on GitHub, you are only one click away from turning it into a  public website . It is incredibly convenient: instead of sending email updates to collaborators, share the URL and they will always see the latest version.

If you want to learn how to do it, I walk through the process in this tutorial.

→The course is discounted by 30% for you. Contact Yan atyan.holtz.data@gmail.com

If you want to write cleaner code, create polished reports, and master the essentials of GitHub, take a look at Yan's other course: Productive R Workflow. It covers exactly that.

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👣 Last Step?

Ready to put this into practice? Take your latest graph, wrap it in a report, upload it to GitHub, and  share it with us  on the #share-your-viz channel or on social media.

We will do everything we can to help you refine it and boost its visibility.