Why Use Quarto for Data Analysis?

A Practical Demonstration with Medicare Data

Author

Aaron Chafetz

Published

January 23, 2026

Welcome

This website demonstrates the power and flexibility of Quarto for data science and analytics workflows. Through practical examples using Medicare monthly enrollment data from Data.CMS.gov, you’ll see how Quarto transforms your analytical process.

What is Quarto?

“Quarto provides a unified authoring framework for data science, combining your code, its results, and your prose. Quarto documents are fully reproducible and support dozens of output formats, like PDFs, Word files, presentations, and more.”
— Wickham, Çetinkaya-Rundel, and Grolemund, R for Data Science (2e)

Quarto allows you to author documents using:

  • Jupyter notebooks for interactive development
  • Plaintext markdown in your favorite editor (VS Code, Jupyter, RStudio, etc.)

Why Quarto Matters for Your Analytics

Key Benefits

  • 📊 Reproducible: Your analysis, code, and results are all in one place, ensuring anyone can recreate your work
  • 🤖 Automatable: Generate reports programmatically for multiple scenarios or time periods
  • ⚡ Dynamic: Update your data and automatically refresh all visualizations and statistics
  • 🌐 Open Source: Free, community-driven, and continuously improving

Core Elements

Quarto documents combine three powerful components:

  1. YAML Header (+ optional CSS): Controls document formatting, output options, and parameters
  2. Code Chunks: Execute code in R, Python, Julia, or Observable to generate results
  3. Markdown Text: Write narrative prose and include inline code for seamless integration

Together, these elements create presentation-ready visualizations and reports with minimal effort.

Explore the Demonstrations

I’ve created two versions of the same Medicare enrollment analysis to showcase Quarto’s flexibility:

📄 Base Demo

A standard Quarto rendered document showing the fundamental capabilities:

  • Clean, professional output
  • Integrated code and results
  • Basic formatting

✨ Fancy Demo

An enhanced version demonstrating advanced features:

  • Dynamic metadata: Auto-updating date and subtitle
  • Code folding: Readers can toggle code visibility via a link
  • Table of Contents: Easy navigation through sections
  • Custom CSS styling: Professional branding from an external stylesheet
  • Parameterized reporting: Uses params in YAML for reusable templates (e.g., generate reports for all 50 states automatically)

Real-World Application

The analysis uses Medicare monthly enrollment data from Data.CMS.gov, demonstrating how Quarto handles real government data in a reproducible, shareable format.

Get Started

Ready to learn more about implementing Quarto in your workflow? Visit the About page to understand the methodology and technical details behind these demonstrations.

All data are public and sourced from Data.CMS.gov

Disclaimer: The findings, interpretation, and conclusions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. All errors remain our own.