Chapter 3 Data in R

Until now, you’ve created fairly simple data in R and stored it as a vector. However, most (if not all) of you will have much more complicated datasets from your various experiments and surveys that go well beyond what a vector can handle. Learning how R deals with different types of data and data structures, how to import your data into R and how to manipulate and summarise your data are some of the most important skills you will need to master.

In this Chapter we’ll go over the main data types in R and focus on some of the most common data structures. We will also cover how to import data into R from an external file, how to manipulate (wrangle) and summarise data and finally how to export data from R to an external file.