Introducing the shinydashboard package

We have already gotten to know the Shiny framework, and learned how to create interactive web applications. This concept would perfectly apply to the concept of dashboards, as they also have to be available to the whole company. Therefore, the creators of the Shiny framework went one step further and developed an add-on to the Shiny library called shinydashboard. This package gives you the perfect structure to build your own dashboard powered by R.

Installing shinydashboard

Before you can install shinydashboard, you have to be sure that you have installed the Shiny package, as we learned in Chapter 4, Shiny – a Web-app Framework for R.

Installing the shinydashboard package is easy, as it is available on CRAN. So, we can install it by typing:

install.packages("shinydashboard")

Explaining the structure of shinydashboard

Dashboards built with shinydashboard have the same underlying structure as other applications built with the Shiny framework. Their basic structure...