RStudio Workshop Series: Where Can I Access R and RStudio?

Welcome everyone to RStudio Workshop #1. Today, we're going to be talking about R and RStudio. A lot of folks use these terms interchangeably, but generally, if someone says they're working with R, they're actually working with RStudio, which we'll cover in just a minute. So the R software is our base software application; we can use this for data manipulation, statistical analysis, graphing (so making data visualizations), and it's code driven. So this is why a lot of people get nervous, because you actually have to write code to help you do the things you're trying to do in the software. So it's not point-and-click. 

RStudio is another software that we can have; it's an additional software that we can put on top of R to make it easier to work with. So you don't need RStudio to use R, but it does make your life quite a bit easier, so I do recommend you download R and then you download RStudio, which we'll cover together. Both R and RStudio are open source, which means they're free, and the capabilities of R can be extended through packages. There's a lot of packages in what we call “base R”, so you don't need to install anything else if you don't want to, but if you want to do additional things (like make pretty graphs, for example), you'd need additional packages. So I've left you a link here about the CRAN packages that you can get. There are lots and we'll start downloading some as early as today, I think we're using one for Excel. 

Where can you actually access or download RStudio? R and RStudio are available for public use on the library computers at the University of Guelph, so if you're a student, a staff, or a faculty member, come on in during library hours; our computer should all have R and RStudio. If you want to have it on your own computer, you absolutely can. It's [open source], which means it's [free]. You can download R pretty easily from the web page, so I've left you the link and if you click on the link it will take you to CRAN. So the Comprehensive R Archive Network is what we call CRAN. This is the folks who essentially, do R and RStudio for the internet. So the first little square or rectangle here is downloading and installing R; the only thing you need to know right now is what operating system are you using. 

So I'm on a Windows computer, if I was downloading R for the first time, I would click where it says “Download R for Windows”. It'll take me to a page like this. There's a few different options. I would click this blue button that says “install R for the first time”. I already have R on my computer, so I'm not going to click this right now, but if you click this, it's pretty simple; it walks you through all the steps like it normally would. If you're looking to follow along with the workshop series, I do recommend you try to download it today. We have lots of time for questions at the end; if you get stuck, I can help walk you through that. So that's a little bit about R and I've left you a screenshot of what that looks like. R is the base package. You need R before you can use RStudio. The other thing I should mention that I didn't put in our little notes here is if you already have SPSS, which is a different statistical package, some folks get confused because there is something called “R for SPSS”. So it might seem like you already have R on your computer, but if you have never actually gone to this website to download it, that's something different. So if you have R for SPSS, it's not the same thing as what I'm showing you now, so download it if you want it on your own computer. You're also welcome to follow along on the library computers. 

Okay, so that's downloading R, that's step one. Step two is downloading RStudio. So if we click our link in our notes, it will open up our RStudio desktop. This is where you download RStudio. We can either accept or reject cookies, I'm going to throw them away because I don't need them. And it says step one is install R; so if you haven't already done that, do that step first. Your second step, whenever you get a chance, is installing RStudio. You don't even need it for today's presentation if you don't want to, but feel free to download if you so choose, and then I can help you if you get stuck. So if you download RStudio, the blue button here is for Windows; if you're on something other than Windows, if you just scroll down, there's some other options that you could pick from as well. And I've left you the screenshot of what it looks like.