To get started, click on “File” > “New File” > “R Notebook. The lower-left pane is called the console, which runs the R code. And the pane in the bottom-right will display my results. The pane in the upper-right, where it says “ Environment is empty,” will show the working dataset. *If you need help installing R or RStudio, feel free to use this installation guide.Īs you can see, the upper-left pane is the editor.

Start out by installing R and then RStudio (get the preview version here.) They’ve also recently released R Markdown Notebooks, a seamless integration of code, plain text, and results that can be exported into PDF. RStudio also includes useful tools (referred to as packages) for data manipulation ( dplyr), cleaning ( tidyr), visualizations ( ggplot2), report writing ( rmarkdown & knitr), and publishing to the web ( shiny & ggviz). RStudio is an integrated development environment (IDE) that streamlines the R programming workflow into an easy to read layout.

But “free” in this case does not necessarily mean “easy.” Learning to program in R is time-consuming and occasionally frustrating, but, fortunately, the number of helpful tools and packages is always growing.

One of the major positive aspects of R is that it’s open-source (free). R is a powerful statistical programming language for manipulating, graphing, and modeling data.

R and rstudio