One of the more difficult things about learning a new tool is the investment you make while you’re learning things you already know in your current tool. That can feel like time wasted – it’s not, but it’s a very frustrating experience. One of the ways to speed up this part is to ‘translate’ concepts you know in your current tool into concepts for your new one.

In that spirit, here’s a brief introduction to where things live in R compared to Excel. Excel is a very visual medium – you can see and manipulate your objects all the time. You can do the same in R, it’s just that they are arranged in slightly different ways.

Data

Data is the most important part. In Excel, it lives in the spreadsheet. In R it lives in a data structure – commonly a data frame. In Excel you can always see your data.

In R you can too – go to the environment window and click on the spreadsheet-looking icon, it will give you your data in the viewer window if it’s an object that can be reproduced like that (if you don’t have this option, your object may be a list not a data frame). You can’t manipulate the data like this, however – you need code for that. You can also use commands like head(myData) to see the first few lines, tail(myData) to see the last few and print(myData) to see the whole object.

Code

Excel uses code to make calculations and create statistics – but it often ‘lives’ behind the object it produces. Sometimes it can make your calculation look like the original data and create confusion for your stakeholders (and for you!).

In R code is used in a similar way to Excel, but it lives in a script, a .R file. This makes it easier to reuse, understand and more powerful to manipulate. Using code in a script saves a lot of time and effort.

Results and calculations

In Excel, results and calculations live in a worksheet in a workbook. It can be easy to confuse with the original data, it’s hard to check if things are correct and re-running analyses (you often re-run them!) is time consuming.

In R, if you give your result or analysis a name, it will be in the Environment, waiting for you – you can print it, copy it, change it, chart it, write it out to Excel for a coworker and recreate it any time you need with your script.

That’s just a simple run down – there’s a lot more to R! But it helps a lot to know where everything ‘lives’ as you’re getting started. Good luck!