Examine Data

This lesson is called Examine Data, part of the Getting Started With R course. This lesson is called Examine Data, part of the Getting Started With R course.

Transcript

Click on the transcript to go to that point in the video. Please note that transcripts are auto generated and may contain minor inaccuracies.

View code shown in video

library(tidyverse)

coffee_ratings <- read_csv(file = "coffee_ratings.csv")

coffee_ratings

glimpse(coffee_ratings)

library(skimr)

skim(coffee_ratings)

library(pointblank)

scan_data(coffee_ratings)

Your Turn

View your data in the following ways:

In the console by typing coffee_ratings
Using the glimpse() function (make sure you run library(tidyverse) first)
With the Positron Data Explorer
With scan_data() from the {pointblank} package

Have any questions? Put them below and we will help you out!

You need to be signed-in to comment on this post. Login.

Corbin Campbell • March 18, 2026

When I ran Data Scan, I received an error in "ggplot2..." "problem while computing stat" "error occurred in the 3rd layer" "argument must be coercible to non-negative integer"

Gracielle Higino Coach • March 18, 2026

Hi Corbin! Can you share the exact code you used and the version of the pointblank package you're using?

Gwynne Morrissey • September 24, 2026

I installed the skimr package! It said it was successfully unpacked and MD5 sums checked. When I look in the Packages pane and search for skimr, though, it says "no packages found". And when I tried to use skim(coffee_ratings), I got 'could not find function "skim"'.

Gracielle Higino Coach • September 24, 2026

Hi Gwynne! That's odd... Have you tried refreshing the package pane? There's a little arrow in a circle on the top right of this panel. Restarting your R session might help, too. If you try installing again and it doesn't work, please copy here the whole message you get when the package stops installing.

Maia Werner-Avidon • September 24, 2026

Just curious why sometimes things are in quotation marks and sometimes not. Are the ones in quotation marks being brought in from outside R and then once they are in R, you don't need the quotation marks any more?

Gracielle Higino Coach • September 24, 2026

Hi Maia! We get this question a lot and the truth is that we don't exactly know a rule that works in absolutely all the cases. But in general, we use quotation marks when we're dealing with characters and literal text in general (like when we're adding a title to a plot or mentioning a specific character value in our dataset), which also includes file paths and packages names when we're installing them. For the packages case, you can think of it like we're looking for a package with a name that matches what's between the quotation marks, so it's a search string. When things have names (like columns and objects), we don't need the quotation marks.

text values in cells -> they don't have names -> we use "" (e.g., "Adelie" in the penguins dataset)

columns -> have names -> we don't use "" (e.g., harvest_year in the coffee ratings dataset)

objects -> have names -> we don't use "" (e.g., your coffee_ratings dataset object)

plot titles -> are literal texts -> don't have names -> we use "" (e.g., title = "This plot is awesome!")

Tricky thing: when you have column names with spaces, you must use backticks (`) (e.g., `Body Mass`). Sometimes using quotation marks in these cases also works, but these cases are exceptions.