Exporting nice plots from R

It's not always easy getting the right size. The image is CC by Kristina Gill.

It’s not always easy getting the right size. The image is CC by Kristina Gill.

A vital part of statistics is producing nice plots, an area where R is outstanding. The graphical ablility of R is often listed as a major reason for choosing the language. It is therefore funny that exporting these plots is such an issue in Windows. This post is all about how to export anti-aliased, high resolution plots from R in Windows. Continue reading

Spinal vs general anesthesia

Drops from a needle. The image is CC by Evan Leeson

Drops from a needle. The image is CC by Evan Leeson

Many of us orthopaedic surgeons have been frustrated by waiting for the anesthesiologist to finish with the spinal anesthesia. It is therefore of great relief that Pugely et al. write that this frustration is not in vain. Patients that receive spinal anesthesia seem to have fewer complications after a total knee arthroplasty than those with general anesthesia. A conclusion based on a large registry study with 14 000 patients although the overall odds ratio was though not that alarming, 1.3. Continue reading

Tables from R into Word

A good looking table matters!

A good looking table matters!

This tutorial is on how to create a neat table in Word by combining knitr and R Markdown. I’ll be using my own function, htmlTable, from the Gmisc package.

Update: With the latest RStudio verions getting tables from R into Word is even easier, see my new post on the subject.

Background: Because most journals that I submit to want the documents in Word and not LaTeX, converting my output into Word is essential. I used to rely on converting LaTeX into Word but this was tricky, full of bugs and still needed tweaking at the end. With R Markdown and LibreOffice it’s actually rather smooth sailing, although I must admit that I’m disappointed at how bad Word handles html. Continue reading