Quarto for Data Science

Published

May 1, 2020

Quarto

Quarto is an open-source scientific and technical publishing system built on Pandoc. You can create dynamic content with Python, R, Julia, and Observable.

We use this perfect union of Jupyter Notebooks and RMarkdown for reporting on our projects. It leverages Markdown and Python code chunks to create dynamic HTML content.

Markdown

Markdown is a plain text formatting syntax aimed at making writing more accessible. The philosophy behind Markdown is that plain text documents should be readable without tags making a mess, but there should still be ways to add text modifiers like lists, bold, italics, etc. It is an alternative to WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editors, which use rich text that later gets converted to proper HTML.

Quarto Basics

You will need to install the Quarto CLI and then go through the VS Code directions on using Quarto with Python.

  1. Install Quarto CLI
  2. Download the class instructional template. Open it in VS Code and press the Preview button. It should produce a HTML file with a Plotly Express Chart and a data table. (If it errors, it may be missing some libraries. Here is the code to install them.)
  1. If you still can not Preview your .qmd template file. Run quarto check in your Terminal section of VS Code and copy paste the ouput in a DM to your teacher or TA.

Quarto Preview Tip

When clicking on the Preview Icon in the top right of your .qmd file, some students experience the preview rendering their entire course website. If this is the case, you can fix it by only opening the project.qmd file you are working on in VS-Code instead of opening the entire course folder.

Continue to Git and GitHub

Install Git and GitHub

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