1 Getting Started with R

You may have worked with Excel for some of your data analysis work. Microsoft’s Excel is a good introductory package for learning how to analyze data, as the software provides a very visual interface with a menu bar to help you navigate to the appropriate place. With Excel, you are able to easily view your input, any formulas that you inserted, and your output. So you might wonder why other software is needed.

While there are many tasks for which Excel is appropriate, R is a programming language that provides more flexibility than Excel. R is not bound by a spreadsheet, where the data need to be entered in cells. For more complex analyses, Excel’s spreadsheet format is too restrictive. And R is freely available on-line with new content being uploaded regularly.