Communicating results clearly is critical to the success of an analytics project. However, doing it well can take more time than actually performing the analysis. The process of taking analysis from code to presentation is often messy, involving copying, pasting, and manual steps that make it difficult to trace results back to the processes that generated them. If the data or analysis changes, edits have to be made to both the code and the presentation. Because of this, presentations get stale quickly.
Significant strides have been made in the last few years to address this issue by bringing report and presentation generation closer to code and the processes that generate results. knitr and R Markdown are two such tools for the R environment that embody this paradigm of literate programming.