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The Life-Changing Magic of R

David Keyes David Keyes
June 1st, 2018

Many people come to R for one simple reason: it's free. That's one reason why both of us started using it. But as people use R, they come to appreciate its power. Here's an example: have you ever spent time using hlookups and vlookups to work with multiple columns in Excel. Was it a pain? Of course it was! Well, R makes this a million times easier. Check out this short video on using join functions in R.

Package of the month: skimr

When you do data analysis, one of the first things you need to do is get an overview of your data. You might want to know, say, how many missing cases you have or how many people responded to each question. Maybe you want to see the mean, median, and standard deviation for continuous variables. What if we told you there are R packages that could do all of this and more, all with just a tiny bit of code?

skimr is one such package. It provides simple summary statistics to allow you to quickly get started with your data analysis. Run the skim function and it give you an output like this (in case you're confused, it's running on the built-in dataset about flowers). Pretty powerful for just one line of code!

Sample output from skimr

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