Beyond Spreadsheets with R

preface

Data is everywhere, and it’s used in practically every industry in one way or another. One of the most common ways to interact with data, whether numbers or text, is with spreadsheet software. This approach offers several useful features: presenting data in a tabular view, allowing calculations to be performed using those values, and producing summaries of data. What spreadsheets don’t tend to provide is a way to do this repeatedly, reproducibly, or programmatically (without clicking or copying and pasting). Spreadsheets can be great for displaying data (including limited data summaries); but when you want to do something truly powerful with data, you need to go beyond them to a programming language.

Data munging—manipulating raw data—is ...