The R DebateFirst steps

What’s so good about R?Excel (Data analysis) R

Good for displaying Data Good for displaying logic

Pivot charts/ tables! Good for manipulating/merging data

Adding linked table to MS office Statistics!

Scripting

Hundreds of free high quality add on libraries at click of a button

Open source!!

What’s so good about R II?●Excel’s best feature is it’s Pivot

tables/charts* ●R’s basic data structure - the data.frame - is

much like a pivot table●So R starts where Excel ends●It is used by a huge range of top level

academics and increasingly commercially by high end commercial shops, etc

What’s not so good about R?●The initial learning curve●Scripting can take a little while to get used

to, but ...●Obviously not as good as Python :)

When do I need to use R?●When I have data that isn’t a simple table -

e.g. xml●When I want to merge data, e.g. timeseries●When I have complicated data manipulation●When I want to share my logic●When I have an analysis I will be repeating -

ongoing maintenance will be easier

When to use Excel●When I have a simple one off task to do

quickly●When I need to use a Pivot table/chart - can

use R to handle pre data manipulation

R examples●Data manipulation●Data merge●Plotting●Data summary●Regression