Data Entry with R’s Text Editor

Related: Free Ecourse: 5 Things Excel Users Should Know About R

Excel’s greatest strength — and its greatest weakness — is the ease of users to manipulate the basic data. Done well and the capability affords flexibility; done poorly and you are left with hard-coded cells and hidden Column A’s.

With R you approach the data differently by writing each step in code. Generally you do not manipulate the basic data itself and instead write a series of steps in code.

While this is a general rule of thumb of course it’s a generalization. Excel for its part has the VBA programming language and other advanced techniques for solid workbook design. And R does indeed have a spreadsheet-like data entry tool.

Here’s how to work it:

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