External Data
Welcome to the External Data module. In this module you will learn how to use external datasets in your R analyses. We will first cover methods for loading datasets stored in the most common formats.
Learning Goals
After completing this module, you will be able to load data stored as:
- Delimited text files (e.g., tab-delimited, CSV)
- R’s native data files
- SPSS data files
- Excel workbooks
Directory Structure
This module is all about reading data files from your computer’s hard drive. That focus presents a bit of a technical problem. The webr sessions in which you complete the exercises for these tutorials runs directly in your browser and cannot access your computer’s actual file system. So, we’ve created a synthetic directory structure for you to use in this module’s practice problems. The following dendrogram shows the contents of the working directory for the webr sessions that you’ll be using in this module. Note the data files stored in the ./data/ directory: those are the files we’ll be loading in this module.
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