As you’re learning R, it can be hard to come up with data sets that you can practice with. Though many of us have our own data, those might not always be in the best format to do what we want. Our own data are often messy and require ...

Now that you’ve learned the very basics of plotting from our earlier tutorial on making your very first plot in R, this blog post will teach you how to customize your scatterplots to make them look better. If you want to take this even a step fur...

Hello everyone! I am psyched to announce the launch of my free workshop about how to learn R. It’s been a long time in the making, but it is finally here. The workshop is called The Myth of the R Learning Curve (or how not to go crazy when ...

It’s super rewarding when you finally figure out how to plot and visualize your data. But to show off your plot to the rest of the world, you need to first be able to save and export it from your R Studio workspace. In this tutorial, I’m go...

One of the toughest parts of data analysis is preparing your data to be analyzed. We often have to deal with problems like NAs, typos, and data that are formatted incorrectly. In this blog post, I’m specifically going to help you with that last o...

We’ve talked a lot about how to use different pre-made functions in R, but sometimes you just need to make your own function to tackle your data. In this blog post, I’m going to talk about how to create your own function and give a few exam...

If you’ve ever been totally confused by ggplot2 and what it is or how it works, my intention is that this short tutorial simplifies it down to a conceptual level from which you can build up later. Hope you enjoy! Data visualization is a powerful...

In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to plot and customize boxplots (also known as box and whisker plots). Boxplots are a common type of graph that allow you to look at the relationships between a continuous variable and various categorica...

We often want to search for a certain character pattern in our data. We do this all the time when we press “ctrl + F” (or “cmd + F” for a mac) on a webpage. For example, maybe you have a list of species names and want to find al...

Last week, we posted a tutorial on the different types of data in R (check it out here). In this tutorial, we’re going to talk about the different structures that R provides to help you organize your data. Data structures go hand-in-hand with dat...

Most of us are pretty familiar with data types in our daily lives — we can easily tell that things like 1, 2, 3, and 4 are numbers (in this case, integers). 15.7 is still a number, but has a decimal. We know that every single word I’m typing in t...

Today I’m going to talk about a useful family of functions that allows you to repetitively perform a specified function (e.g., sum(), mean()) across a vector, list, matrix, or data frame. For those of you familiar with ‘for’ loops, th...

I’ve talked a little bit about pipes (written as %__%) in a past blog post, but they’re so important in R that I thought they deserved their own post. In this tutorial, I’m going to give an explanation of what pipes are and when the...

In scientific data and experiments, we often have groups of subjects between which we want to compare an observed response. For example, we might want to compare the growth rates of plants under different light treatments. Or maybe we want to compare C...

Welcome to part two of my blog series on R Markdown. In the first part, I went over how to create a basic R Markdown document and how to use R Markdown syntax. In this post, I’m going to talk about how you can use R Markdown to learn ...

Today I’m excited to share a blog post on how to use R Markdown. R Markdown is a dynamic file format that allows you to make documents containing normal text alongside chunks of embedded R code. In fact, all of my blog posts are written using R M...

As many of us know, science is not a perfect process. Maybe you can’t get out in the field on a certain day. Maybe you can only sample a portion of what needs to get done. Or maybe you’re downloading public data sets and they aren’t l...

In this blog post, I’m going to talk about joining data tables together. Joining tables is incredibly useful when you have to download several data files on a common set of subjects and then aggregate them into a larger, singular data set. This i...

(¿Quieres más detalles sobre el curso en español? Desplázate hacia abajo.) Hello everyone! This blog post is a bit different from usual posts in that I’d like to make a very exciting announcement about an upcoming course launch. Part of my vision...

With the new year, I’m hoping more of you take up learning R, so with that I want to share a tutorial from my course on an introduction to data visualization with R to help get you started. If you are completely new to R and don’t even ...