When Quarto wasn’t the right answer

Mail merge is back, baby!

Jac Grout

Matt Dray

27 February 2025

Backstory 📖

• NHP outputs reports: need automation/reproducibility
• Quarto was the answer… until it wasn’t!
• Solution: meet users where they are

Implementation ✏️

• Add metadata and store site selections on Azure
• Read SharePoint template, insert content with {officer}
• Write timestamped folder with doc, results, log

• How do we identify chosen runs? On Aure, with run_stage metadata on results files and a list of chosen sites.
• How to confirm with model relationship managers? Expose tagged scenarios and sites via a scheduled Quarto-report.
• Basic interface: supply a scheme code, at simplest level.
• Underlying functions save figures and values independently.
• Images inserted by moving the imaginary ‘cursor’ to a known string of text in the report.
• Value-insertion is more complicated: insert ‘field’ codes into the report, insert the values to custom document properties, refresh to insert these into the fields.
• The output is a timestamped directory with the report, standalone images and values, and a log.

‘Doing it right’ 💯

• Github: ‘learn by doing’, challenge and improve things
• Documentation/version history have saved us!
• The repo is a springboard for parallel/future work

Reflections 🪞

• Challenge your thinking, be adaptable to user needs
• Embrace agility and acknowledge fragility
• ‘The power of friendship’ keeps things working

• The default mode of ‘make a Quarto doc’ wasn’t the right fit here, but we recognised that and pivoted quickly.
• We know the solution isn’t perfect, but it is good enough.
• The process has some frailties, but we recognise them. For example, the report path being changed on SharePoint means we can’t retrieve it!
• Talking between us on the code side, but also with the user, is really important to handle changing needs and to keep the process and outputs fir for purpose.