R Programming Guide
R Programming Guide
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If you have Microsoft Excel skills, I can teach you how to use R programming to
analyze your business data.
Doesn't matter if you've never coded before. Your basic skills with Excel tables,
formulas, and pivot tables makes this possible.
Despite helping 1000s of professionals learn R programming over the years, I don't
expect you to take my word for it.
That's why this document exists. I like to let my content do the talking.
If you like what you see, I wanted to let you know that I'll be delivering hands-on
training with R programming in September.
-Dave
Certificate of completion
9 hours of instruction
Hands-on labs
Limited to 20 students
PDFs of all slides/labs
All R code
1-on-1 help if needed
Recordings if you miss a class
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R PROGRAMMING MADE EASY - LIVE
Table of Contents
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While most Excel users don't think of it this way, they spend a lot of time writing and
debugging code in Excel. In fact, Microsoft Excel is by far and away the world's most
popular programming environment.
Take the image below as an example. The user is using Excel's AVERAGE function to
calculate the average of a column (i.e., Petal.Width) of a table (i.e., iris_data) in a
worksheet.
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Once the user hits the <enter> key, Excel attempts to interpret the instructions in the
cell and perform the desired operation. If Excel doesn't understand what the user
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typed, it reports an error.
That's coding!
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R Code
While it isn't the only way to code in Excel, calling Excel functions as depicted on the
previous page is by far the most common. When using Excel in this way, Excel is
operating as a code interpreter.
Using R as an interpreter is very common. The R user types some code and hits the
<enter> key. R then tries to interpret the code, throwing an error if doesn't
understand what was typed by the user.
In this way Excel and R are very similar, but it doesn't stop there. Even the code is
very similar!
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The image below depicts the same scenario as on the previous page, but using R
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As depicted, the user is calculating the average (mean is just another name
for the average) of the Petal.Width column of the iris_data table.
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While this example might seem simple, it demonstrates why R is the fastest, easiest
way for ANY team to unlock advanced analytics.
As you will see through the rest of this document, Excel is a powerful analytical tool
with many concepts and skills that need to be mastered to use Excel effectively.
This knowledge makes the learning process an exercise in mapping Excel skills to R.
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As depicted below, Excel features above the water line (e.g., Pivot Tables) only
scratch the surface of Excel's capabilities. However, these feature represent the bulk
of Excel's use in practice.
Another similarity between Excel and R is the "choose your own adventure" aspect
of the technologies. Just as many Excel users never learn Power Query, not every R
user needs to learn statistical analysis to be effective in their work.
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Tables Data Frames
Common Functions Common Functions
Pivot Tables dplyr
Charts ggplot2
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Excel tables can also be thought of as container objects. Tables contain rows, columns,
cells, data formats, etc.
You probably can see where I'm going with this already.
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When analyzing data with R, it's all about the tables - just like Excel.
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Once again, your Excel knowledge directly translates to R.
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The image below demonstrates how Excel tables are objects. For example, every
table in Excel has a name - whether you explicitly name a table or not. Table names
allow you to directly access/manipulate tables using Excel code.
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Things work in R exactly the same way. Tables of data in R (known as "data frames")
have names just like Excel tables so that you can write R code to access/manipulate
tables of data.
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Working with cells of data is very common in Excel. It is useful to think of cells as
objects contained within tables - as depicted below. Once again, you use Excel code
to access cells.
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Excel code supports different ways of accessing columns of data within tables. Two
examples:
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Notice how similar the actual R code is to Excel when using object names.
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The bulk of code Excel users write call functions. Often, these function calls are nested
and can be difficult to debug (again, that's coding!).
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The contrived example from the previous page is repeated using R code.
A IsSetosa column is being added to the iris.data table (or data frame) and populated
with new data derived from the existing Species column.
First, notice how the workflow is exactly the same as in Excel - only everything is
done in code with R.
Second, notice how similar the R ifelse function call is to Excel code.
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Common Functions
Like Excel, R comes out of the box with many, many functions to work with columns
of data.
Many of the R functions share the same name with the corresponding Excel
function. In other cases, mapping your Excel knowledge to R is straightforward, as
depicted below.
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Excel is a great data visualization tool, supporting many ways to analyze data
visually.
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R Data Visualizations
R also easily produces data visualizations that are difficult, or not possible, to do with
out of the box Excel features.
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"Dave! You are incredible! Thank you so much for being such an attentive
instructor!" - Bruce Lam
Certificate of completion
9 hours of instruction
Hands-on labs
Limited to 20 students
PDFs of all slides/labs
All R code
1-on-1 help if needed
Recordings if you miss a
class
Ready to unleash the power of R with your data? Learn more at the link below.
https://bit.ly/RProgrammingLiveTraining
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https://bit.ly/RProgrammingLiveTraining
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