Library Research Guides: R: Common Tasks

Importing and Exporting Data

CSV Import/Export Tutorial
The most basic method of importing and exporting data to/from R involves a CSV, or Comma Separated Values, file. This tutorial demonstrates basic import/export techniques for use with CSVs. This is an R script; check the R Basics tab for information about reading and using scripts in R.

Extended Import/Export
This resource provides other methods to read and write data to and from files.
Loading Data and Basic Formatting in R

Summary Statistics and Cross Tabulation

R Data Wrangling Tutorial
R provides built-in functions to find basic and advanced summary statistics. This R script tutorial demonstrates basic use of summary statistics functions and tabulation within R.

Extended Statistics
This link provides more detailed instructions for calculating various descriptive statistics using R.
More Tabulation
This link provides extended details for creating tables and frequencies using R.

Graphics in R

R provides huge amounts of customization and flexibility when creating graphics. The plots above were both made quickly and simply, using R. To see examples of the wide variety of graphics that can be created using R together with the code used to create them, type demo(graphics)and follow the instructions.

Graphics Examples
This R script provides the code to create the graphs pictured above.

Extended Graphics
This link provides instructions for creating graphs including density plots, bar plots, dot plots, line charts, pie charts, box plots, and scatter plots, as well as advanced customization and annotation options. It also includes information about saving and viewing your graphs.
How to Visualize and Compare Distributions

Merging Files

Merge How-To
The simplest way to merge multiple data sets within R is to use the merge() function. For the documentation, search for merge in the R help. This link provides more detailed instructions for how to merge files in R.

Making Maps in R

Various user-written packages allow you to create maps in R. For a basic description of several common packages, check out this poster.

Mapping in R