We generally only use base and stats from the pre-installed list. R comes pre-installed with some packages like nnet and lattice but in general the user-written packages blow the pre-installed packages out of the water.

The best thing about R and Rguably what makes it so powerful, popular, and perennial is its package system. Excel forces you do do your calculations on the same sheet that your data lives on, which is nonsensical-those calculations aren't part of your data! in R they're separate, and we spend most of our time thinking about the calculations, not staring at the raw data. If you're an excel user, you might be asking, where do I see the spreadsheet? In R, the spreadsheet (data table) isn't typically within your view because you aren't usually concerned with individual data points-you're trying to learn about all of them together.

This is where you edit your complex code and do most of your thinking and work. They're like programs but in general you tend to only run them piece-by-piece. You don't have to run them all at once like is the preferred method in stata. These are files or copy-pastable bits of code.

The console is how R replies to you when you ask it a question or ask it to do something. For a first-timer, it's easier enough to think of this as a place where your output will appear. If you're a super-user, you might spend a lot of time here. Help allows you to see documentation for any packages or functions you wish to use, so if you can't remember how to reshape your data, you'll check there for a short guide/reminder.īottom Left: Console and Terminal. Viewer is where any graphs plots diagrams etc that you make will show up. These are super-useful to the user! Mine is set to packages right now, which I'll explain more about below. I don't tend to use it muchīottom right: Packages, Viewer, Help. This is useful for seeing an at-a-glance of what you can do stuff with. When you make a user-defined-function, here it will be. This tells you what objects, functions, datasets, etc that you have available to you or have defined yourself. The panes are as follows, starting clockwise from the top right: If you only have three, it's probably because you don't have a script page open yet (my top left here) and you can open a new one by clicking the black-page icon under 'File' above.

When you first open Rstudio, it should look like this, with 4 panes.

Downloading r and r studio