Lesson 1: File Organization within R

Nicky Wakim

2024-04-01

Using OneDrive

  • We all have free access to OneDrive to store files

  • Let’s login into our online accounts

  • You can also download OneDrive for your desktop

    • Allows you to access the OneDrive from your computer’s interface instead of the browser

    • Creates a link between your computer and the cloud!

  • Let me show you mine

    • I can access all the files through RStudio as well!

  • Let’s take a couple minutes to log into OneDrive

05:00

Folder organization

  • Make these folders in your computer

    • Only make them in OneDrive if you have a desktop connection

  • For a project, I usually have the following folders

    • Background
    • Code
    • Data_Raw
    • Data_Processed
    • Dissemination
    • Reports
    • Meetings

  • For our class, I suggest making one folder for the course with the following folders in it:

    • Data
    • Homework
    • Notes
    • Project
    • Quizzes
    • And other folders if you want
  • Take a few minutes to create these folders
05:00

Now download some data from my the OneDrive

  • Go into the Student files folder

  • Download the dataset in Sample_folder, under Data

  • Create your own Sample_folder under Notes

    • Save the dataset there

  • Alternatively, you can download all of Sample_folder and then put that under Notes

Creating project in RStudio

  • Way to designate a working directory: basically your home base when working in R

    • We have to tell R exactly where we are in our folders and where to find other things

    • A project makes it easier to tell R where we are

  • Basic steps to create a project

    • Go into RStudio

    • Create new project for this class (under File or top right corner)

  • Once we have projects, we can open one are R will automatically know that its location is the start of our working directory

  • Let me show you my process

    • I will create one in my Sample_folder

    • I will show you how I switch between classes

05:00

Creating a new qmd file

  • Basic steps

    • Create new .qmd (under File or top left corner)

    • Decide on document types/options

  • Let me show you my process

  • Create a .qmd in your Sample_folder under any folder (maybe Notes is good)

05:00

Looking at Source vs. Visual

Here package

  • Good source for the here package

  • Just substitute .Rmd with .qmd

  • Basically, a .qmd file and .R file work differently

    • We haven’t worked much with .R files

  • For .qmd files, the automatic directory is the folder it is in

    • But we want it to be the main project folder

  • here can help with that

Install here package

  • Install here package: you can do this in your console (not inside .qmd file)
install.packages("here")

  • Within your console, type here() and enter

    • Try this with getwd() as well

Using here() to load data

  • There here() function will start at the working directory (where your .Rproj file is) and let you write out a file path for anything

  • To load the dataset in our .qmd file, we will use:

data = read_excel(here("./Data/CH05Q01.xls"))
data = read_excel(here("Data", "CH05Q01.xls"))

Watch out when using lubridate package simultaneously

Use here::here() if you have lubridate loaded within same .qmd. This will tell R to use the function here() within the here package instead of lubridate’s here() function. To call lubridate’s function, we’d use lubridate::here()

05:00

Lesson 1: File Organization within R