Getting going in R and RStudio
Welcome
This is an interactive tutorial and was created by Dr. Mark Greenwood (greenwood@montana.edu) based on the source code that was originally created by RStudio.
Outline
This tutorial will help you set up your computer to use R. It is for you if you need to:
- Install R on your computer
- Install the RStudio IDE
You can skip this tutorial if you’ve already done these things in the last month. See notes below that discuss suggested updates to R and RStudio.
Is this tutorial for you?
Do you need to work through the tutorial? Take the quiz below to find out.
Install R
How to install R
Test your knowledge
The video was recorded with a previous version of R (3.3.2). Before moving to the next step, complete the installation on R. It is important to note that if you have previously installed R, you should complete the same steps to get an updated version of R.
Install RStudio
How to install RStudio
RStudio is an Integrated Development Environment for R. What does that mean? Well, if you think of R as a language, which it is, you can think of RStudio as a program that helps you write and work in the language. RStudio makes programming in R much easier and I suggest that you use it!
Test your knowledge
With R and RStudio installed, you are now ready to start writing code that will allow you to load data sets and perform statistical analysis.
Using R via RStudio
Console
It is good to start with trying out the console to do some quick code work and for things like using it as a calculator. You can see further discussion of this in Chapter 1 of Greenwood (2021).
R Markdown
Eventually, you will want to move to using reproducible research methods via R Markdown. R Markdown provides an authoring framework for data wrangling and statistical analysis. A single R Markdown file can be used to save and execute code and generate high quality reports that are fully reproducible. You can go to RStudio’s website for a complete tutorial.
That tutorial starts with this video that discusses some of what you can do with R Markdown:
Back up option to access R via RStudio Server (MSU Students only):
If you are having any difficulties getting your local installation of R and RStudio to work (you may not discover this until you try to use it to complete tasks), there is one other option for you to be able to use R via RStudio via a web-browser.
Rstudio server:
- Go to https://rstudio.math.montana.edu and sign in using your NetID credentials. Currently you need to be on a list to be approved to access this server version of RStudio (hopefully related to how you ran into this tutorial) and so this method may not be available to you (especially if you are not MSU affiliated). In this version of RStudio, to load a data set or .Rmd file, go to the “Files” tab in the lower right panel (not “File” in the upper ribbon) and use the “Upload” button and “Choose File” to pick the file from your local directory structure. This same “Files” location can also be used to download files (use “More” and then “Export” to download .Rmd files). Working in the session window should otherwise resemble working on a local installation of RStudio and be running a recent version (4.1.1 when I last checked). Your work should be available when you re-open this until the end of the semester, but because it is new for us to serve RStudio locally, we would recommend downloading your work at the end of each session until we can test the system more fully.