10.9 Loading .csv files using RStudio

Frequently in code I will have things written up to load data using the read.csv() command. However, there is a point-and-click way of loading spreadsheet data into RStudio too.

There’s on pane in RStudio that doesn’t get used much by basic R users, the “Environment, History, Connections, Build, Git” pane (I think it might not have “Git” on it if you don’t have certain packages loaded).

Figure 10.4: A list of files stored on GitHub.

If you click on the spreadsheet-looking icon “Import Dataset” and select “From text (base)” you can navigate to where your .csv file is located and select it. A preview window will then pop up which will show you the raw (which should look like what you originally down loaded) and a preview of how RStudio will format the data. (If the preview doesn’t look right you can change some of the option in the drop down menus to see if things line up.)

Figure 10.5: A list of files stored on GitHub.

When you click “Import” RStudio will execute some code in the console (eg “Medley1998 <- read.csv(”~/Medley1998.csv“)”) to load the data and then call the command View() to generate preview of the data in a new tab in the script view. (Note that this View panel only lets you look at the data; you can’t edit it.)