Interactive Dashboards in R: A Hands-On Interactive Course

A printed chart shows a shape and then stops answering questions. This three-lesson interactive course turns your R output into something people can explore: charts you can hover and zoom, maps you can pan, views that update each other, and a small live app of your own.

You already know how to make a chart. This course is about the next step: making that chart respond. Across three guided lessons you move from a single interactive plot to a fully linked dashboard, and finally to your first reactive Shiny app, where a control on the screen drives the output in real time.

Each lesson is a guided, interactive experience: you run live R in the browser, answer checkpoints as you go, and see each idea work on real data before you build it yourself.

The three lessons

Lesson 1: Charts and maps you can explore

Turn an ordinary ggplot into an interactive plotly chart with one line, ggplotly(), so readers can hover for exact values and drag to zoom. Then put your data on a leaflet map: a real street basemap with a marker and a popup for every row. You also learn the judgment call that matters most, when interactivity genuinely helps a reader and when a clean static chart is the better choice.

Start Lesson 1: Charts and maps you can explore

Lesson 2: Quarto dashboards and linked views

Lay out a real dashboard in Quarto: value boxes for the headline numbers and chart tiles arranged on a grid. Then wire the pieces together with crosstalk so a selection in one view filters every other view at once, the moment that makes a dashboard feel like a single instrument rather than a page of separate charts.

Lesson 2 is coming soon.

Lesson 3: Your first Shiny app

Build reactivity from scratch. Start with the smallest possible Shiny app, one input driving one output, and watch how the reactive graph re-runs only what it needs when the input changes. This is the mental model every larger Shiny app is built on.

Lesson 3 is coming soon.

Who this is for

You can already build a basic chart in R, in base graphics or ggplot2, and you want your output to do more than sit still on a page. You do not need any prior plotly, leaflet, Quarto or Shiny experience. By the end you will know how to make a chart explorable, link several views into one dashboard, and stand up a live app that responds to its user.

What you will be able to do

• Make a chart interactive with ggplotly() so readers can hover for values and zoom in
• Put data on a leaflet map with markers and popups, and pick the right basemap
• Decide when interactivity helps a reader and when a static chart is clearer
• Lay out a Quarto dashboard and link views together with crosstalk
• Build a first Shiny app and explain how its reactive graph re-runs

Ready? Begin with Lesson 1.