One big advantage of R is its breadth. If anything has been done in statistics, there is an R package that will do it.
The problem is that sometimes there are four packages that will do it. This is big problem with R (and with Python for that matter).
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Of all the stressors you’ve got right now, accessing your statistical software from home shouldn’t be one of them. (You know, the one on your office computer).
We’ve gotten some updates from some statistical software companies on how they’re making it easier to access the software you have a license to or to extend a free trial while you’re working from home.
Choosing statistical software is part of The Fundamentals of Statistical Skill and is necessary to learning a second software (something we recommend to anyone progressing from Stage 2 to Stage 3 and beyond).
There are multiple ways to interface with R. Some common interfaces are the basic R GUI, R Commander (the package “Rcmdr” that you use on top of the basic R GUI), and RStudio.
When I first started to learn to use R, I was bound and determined to use the basic R GUI.
As someone who was already used to programming in SAS, I wasn’t looking for a (more…)
If you are like I was for a long time, you have avoided learning R.
You’ve probably heard that there’s a steep learning curve. Or noticed that the available documentation is not necessarily user-friendly.
Frankly, both things are true, to some extent.
The best and worst thing about R is that it is open-source. So there is no single (more…)
We’ve talked a lot around here about the reasons to use syntax — not only menus — in your statistical analyses.
Regardless of which software you use, the syntax file is pretty much always a text file. This is true for R, SPSS, SAS, Stata — just about all of them.
This is important because it means you can use an unlikely tool to help you code: Microsoft Word.
I know what you’re thinking. Word? Really?
Yep, it’s true. Essentially it’s because Word has much better Search-and-Replace options than your stat software’s editor.
Here are a couple features of Word’s search-and-replace that I use to help me code faster: