It's All About the Tables
The primary concept in Excel is the table. Most of the analyses performed in Excel day-in, day-out boil down to the selection, filtering, manipulation, and aggregation of tabular data.
The same is true for R.
If you recall the iceberg metaphor, when R is used as a data analysis tool, you are mostly "staying above the water." This means that the heavy duty programming aspects of R (e.g., writing custom functions) rarely come into play.
Conceptually, working with tabular data is the same between Excel and R. Excel even supports syntax (i.e., explicitly referencing tables and columns) that mirrors R syntax. The two primary considerations in moving from Excel to R:
- Excel tries to be helpful and handles a lot for you "automagically". In R, you have to be explicit.
- With R you basically type everything as code. In Excel you type quite a bit (e.g., applying Excel functions to a table), but there is also a lot of graphical interfaces (e.g., column filter dialogs) that you use.
This lesson is a very brief introduction to the power of working with tabular data in R. It demonstrates that knowledge of Excel provides you with skills to quickly and easily learn working with data in R.
The full version of this course ("R Programming Made Easy") goes into working with tables of data in R in great detail.
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