I have a question for the community.

Am I required to have a line to import a file whenever I knit an R Notebook file? The dataframe I'd like to use is already in memory as part of my global environment, but unless I include an import line I get the following error in the render tab of the console pane in RStudio:

Error ... : object 'my_df' not found
Calls: <Anonymous>... withCallingHandlers -> withVisible -> eval -> eval ->  filter
Execution halted

This error occurs at the beginning of my notebook where I'm reassigning a filtered object for analysis. Currently I have to import the object (it's an xlsx file) before I knitting completes successfully.

Any thoughts? Thanks!