Introduction to Importing Data in R

In this course, you will learn to read CSV, XLS, and text files in R using tools like readxl and data.table.

Importing data into R should be the easiest step in your analysis. Unfortunately, that is almost never the case. Data can come in many formats, ranging from .csv and text files, to statistical software files, to databases and HTML data. Knowing which approach to use is key to getting started with the actual analysis.
In this course, you’ll start by learning how to read .csv and text files in R. You will then cover the readr and data.table packages to easily and efficiently import flat file data. After that, you will learn how to read .xls files in R using readxl.

• Importing data from flat files with utils
• A lot of data comes in the form of flat files: simple tabular text files. Learn how to import the common formats of flat file data with base R functions.
• readr & data.table
• In addition to base R, there are dedicated packages to easily and efficiently import flat file data. We'll talk about two such packages: readr and data.table.
• Importing Excel data
• Excel is a widely used data analysis tool. If you prefer to do your analyses in R, though, you'll need an understanding of how to import .csv data into R. This chapter will show you how to use readxl to do so.
• Reproducible Excel work with XLConnect
• Beyond importing data from Excel, you can take things one step further with XLConnect. Learn all about it and bridge the gap between R and Excel.