Summary

To wrap things up, the basic R Markdown approach will allow you to engage in your work in a more reproducible fashion. It will force you to think about explaining what you’re doing, and the data and analysis will be intimately tied to the text you write. Here are a couple of things to keep in mind.

• In general, you want to use HTML, i.e. a web-based approach, first and foremost. This will serve your own and most other needs, from fully ‘publishable’ documents, to presentation slides, to standard programming scripts, to books that have nothing to do with statistical analysis or programming.
  
• If you must have something that has to look even better in print, then you have the PDF approach via \(LaTeX\)
• If you choose to use MS Word, at least with R Markdown you can do things in a reproducible fashion, and save time in results reporting, if not much else.

At this point you should be ready to dive in with your own documents. Using the tools described will take some time to get used to, but the time you’ll gain in efficiency cannot be understated. What’s more, your work will be far more reproducible, a key goal for any quantitative endeavor. Best of Luck!