It was my great pleasure to present last week to the NYC Data Hackers on the topic of Copilot for R. If you haven't come across Copilot before, it's like an AI-based pair programmer that suggests new lines of code, and perhaps entire functions, based on context. In the presentation (video below) I showed how while I was editing in Visual Studio Code with Copilot enabled, it suggested tidyverse functions for cleaning a data set, and even the code for performing an analysis of variance: I also took a behind-the-scenes look to see how Copilot uses Generative AI to make its suggestions. With the ..read more

On July 1 2023, the MRAN website and the CRAN snapshot archive hosted therein will be retired, Microsoft announced last week.  One purpose of MRAN was to distribute Microsoft R Open, which was discontinued in 2021. MRAN has also served since 2014 as the repository of a daily archive of CRAN packages. Some R users may still be using these static CRAN snapshots as a default CRAN repository for R scripts either directly, via the checkpoint package, or via older images of the rocker/r-ver container. If this affects you, you will need to find or create a new source of the package archive befor ..read more

Ever written a tutorial for R — or simply shared some R code with someone — and been told that your code doesn't work on their machine? There's now an easy way to solve that problem: Dev Containers. Dev Containers are a standardized container format designed for interactive use. You can set up a Dev Container with the specific version of R, R packages, and other software to guarantee that your R code will run on their machine just as it did on yours. Dev Containers are 100% open source and integrated with Visual Studio Code, which provides a convenient environment for running your R scripts an ..read more

by Hong Ooi This article is a lightly-edited version of the "Microsoft365R and Shiny" vignette in the latest Microsoft365R release. We describe how to incorporate Microsoft365R and interactive authentication with Azure Active Directory (AAD) into a Shiny web app. There are a few steps involved: Register your app with AAD Use the app ID to authenticate and get an OAuth token Pass the token to the Microsoft365R functions App registration The default Microsoft365R app registration only works when the package is used on a local machine; it does not support running in a remote server. Because of ..read more

by Hong Ooi Microsoft365R author here. I've just updated the package on GitHub with the following features: Add support for shared mailboxes to get_business_outlook(). To access a shared mailbox, supply one of the arguments shared_mbox_id, shared_mbox_name or shared_mbox_email specifying the ID, displayname or email address of the mailbox respectively. Add support for Teams chats (including one-on-one, group and meeting chats). Use the list_chats() function to list the chats you're participating in, and the `get_chat()` function to retrieve a specific chat. A chat object has class ms_ch ..read more

by Hong Ooi This is a summary of the updates to AzureR family of packages in May and June 2021. AzureAuth Change the default caching behaviour to disable the cache if running inside Shiny. Update Shiny vignette to clean up redirect page after authenticating (thanks to Tyler Littlefield). Add a create_AzureR_dir function to create the caching directory manually. This can be useful not just for non-interactive sessions, but also Jupyter and R notebooks, which are not technically interactive in the sense that they cannot read user input from a console prompt. AzureGraph Add enhanced support f ..read more

by Hong Ooi I’m happy to announce that Microsoft365R 2.1.0 is now on CRAN with Outlook email support! Here’s a quick summary of the new features: Send, reply to and forward emails, optionally composed with blastula or emayili Copy and move emails between folders Create, delete, copy and move folders Add, remove and download attachments Here’s a sample of how to write an email using blastula: library(Microsoft365R) # 1st one is for your personal Microsoft account # 2nd is for your work & school account outl <- get_personal_outlook() outlb <- get_business_outlook() # compose an em ..read more

by Hong Ooi This is an announcement that a beta Outlook email client is now part of the Microsoft365R package. You can install it from the GitHub repository with: devtools::install_github("Azure/Microsoft365R") The client provides the following features: Send, reply to and forward emails, optionally composed with blastula or emayili Copy and move emails between folders Create, delete, copy and move folders Add, remove and download attachments The plan is to submit this to CRAN sometime next month, after a period of public testing. Please give it a try and give me your feedback: either via ..read more

by Hong Ooi I’m happy to announce that version 2.0 of Microsoft365R, the R interface to Microsoft 365, is now on CRAN! This version adds support for Microsoft Teams, a much-requested feature. To access a team in Microsoft Teams, use the get_team() function and provide the team name or ID. You can also list the teams you’re in with list_teams(). These return objects of R6 class ms_team, which has methods for working with channels and drives. list_teams() team <- get_team("My team") # list the channels in a team (including your private channels) team$list_channels() # get the primary chann ..read more

I’m very happy to announce Microsoft365R, a package for working with the Microsoft 365 (formerly known as Office 365) suite of cloud services. Microsoft365R extends the interface to the Microsoft Graph API provided by the AzureGraph package to provide a lightweight yet powerful interface to SharePoint and OneDrive, with support for Teams and Outlook soon to come. Microsoft365R is now available on CRAN, or you can install the development version from GitHub with devtools::install_github("Azure/Microsoft365R"). Authentication The first time you call one of the Microsoft365R functions (see below ..read more