Moving from Excel to R
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This first post of the Backtesting in Excel and R series will provide some resources to help smooth the transition from the familiarity and comfort of Excel to the potentially strange and intimidating world of R.Want to share your content on R-bloggers? click here if you have a blog, or here if you don't.
I made my voyage from Excel to R more than 5 years ago and learned mostly by trial and error (and reading the R manuals). Most people don’t prefer my approach of “keep at it until you figure it out”, so I don’t have a lot of personal advice to share. My main piece of advice is that the best way to learn R is to use it, so most of the resources below focus on “how-to” do certain things in R.
GUIs
While R for Windows comes with a very basic GUI (I’m not familiar with the R for Mac OS X GUIs), most people will want and benefit from something more elaborate. The GUIs below were taken from the R GUI Projects page (visit the page for more information / alternatives) and I added the newcomer, RStudio:
Blogs / Videos
- The Climate Charts & Graphs blog has a video to help help Excel users get familiar with R, a list of R resources, and–most impressive of all–a toolkit to help Excel users move up to R.
- The Decision Science News blog has two video tutorials (part 1, part 2) to help people get started using R.
- J.D. Long, a fellow economist, has compiled a list of R resources on his blog, Cerebral Mastication.
I haven’t read these two books personally, but I’ve heard very good things about both of them. Both focus on how to accomplish specific tasks with R.
I hope this is helpful. As always, please add suggestions in the comments!
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