3.7 Exporting data

By now we hope you’re getting a feel for how powerful and useful R is for manipulating and summarising data (and we’ve only really scratched the surface). One of the great benefits of doing all your data wrangling in R is that you have a permanent record of all the things you’ve done to your data. Gone are the days of making undocumented changes in Excel or Calc! By treating your data as ‘read only’ and documenting all of your decisions in R you will have made great strides towards making your analysis more reproducible and transparent to others. It’s important to realise, however, that any changes you’ve made to your data frame in R will not change the original data file you imported into R (and that’s a good thing). Happily it’s straightforward to export data frames to external files in a wide variety of formats.