R for Excel Users

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This book is no longer available for sale.

R for Excel Users

An Introduction to R for Excel Analysts

About the Book

While Excel might continue to be your bread-and-butter, knowing R and applying it at the right times can make you a more productive and effective analyst. This book is for beginners, and the goal is to get you started. R is known to have a steep learning curve, but I really think it has three separate curves: (1) data management, (2) statistics and (3) visualization.

The focus of this book will be on data management: how to import, manipulate, transform and summarize data through the use of functions. Once you understand and are able to work with data structures, applying analytical techniques is a relative breeze.

For example, running a linear regression is a simple command that looks like this:

lm(y ~ x1 + x2 + ... xn, data = dataset_name)

That's easy, and if you understand regression, then interpreting the output will also be easy.  But getting your data set in the right format, combining it with other data sets, manipulating columns, filtering rows, etc -- that is the hurdle I will help you overcome.

About the Author

John Taveras
John L Taveras

I have over ten years of business analysis and strategy experience in a number of industries.  I started using Excel during a college internship and it was love at first sight. The structure and logic made sense immediately, and within months I was building advanced tools and teaching colleagues how to get more out of Excel.  Fast-forward a few years, trying R for the first time was not love at first sight.  It was different from anything I had done before, and it seemed like all the learning materials were written for statisticians and coders, which made the transition more difficult.  Thankfully I stuck with it, and today R helps me be more productive and has opened doors to more interesting analyses that I otherwise would not have been able to tackle.

I love to teach, and have helped many colleagues get started with R.  This book, and my website at www.rforexcelusers.com, is my attempt at getting more business analysts started with R.

When I am not analyzing data or writing, I enjoy spending time with my wife and son.  I have a BA in Math & Economics from Wesleyan University, an MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management and work in advertising analytics at Google.  

I would love to hear from you!  Contact me at john@rforexcelusers.com if you have questions, comments, ideas or feedback.

Table of Contents

  •  
    • Preface
    • About me
  • Part 1 - Introduction & Set Up
    • 1. Getting Set Up
      • 1.1 Getting mentally ready to write code
      • 1.2 Downloading the software
      • 1.3 Navigating the software
      • 1.4 Using other Software
      • 1.5 Libraries
      • 1.6 Console tips
      • 1.7 Getting help
    • 2. Programming Basics
      • 2.1 Assigning variables
      • 2.2 Testing conditions
      • 2.3 Data structures
      • 2.4 Special values
      • 2.5 Commenting your code
      • 2.6 Control Structures
    • 3. Quick Start - Analysis Examples
      • 3.1 Example 1: General data analysis
      • 3.2 Example 2: Using SQL in R
      • 3.3 Example 3: Multiple regression model
      • 3.4 Summary
  • Part 2 - Building Blocks: Cells and Formulas
    • 4. Cells are Vectors
      • 4.1 Individual cells
      • 4.2 Cell ranges
      • 4.3 They are all vectors
      • 4.4 Why vectors matter
      • 4.5 Working with vectors
      • 4.6 How vector operations work
      • 4.7 Summary
    • 5. Formulas are Functions
      • 5.1 Inputs
      • 5.2 Outputs
      • 5.3 Getting help on functions
      • 5.4 Some base functions
      • 5.5 Create your own functions
      • 5.6 Summary
  • Part 3 - Data Frames
    • 6. Import and Create Data Sets
      • 6.1 Importing from .csv and .txt files
      • 6.2 Importing from .xlsx files
      • 6.3 Creating a data frame
      • 6.4 Deleting a data frame
      • 6.5 Summary
    • 7. Inspect Your Data
      • 7.1 Sneak a peek with brackets
      • 7.2 Sneak another peek with head() and tail()
      • 7.3 Data structure - str()
      • 7.4 Column names - names()
      • 7.5 Summary stats - summary()
      • 7.6 Inspecting columns - unique(), table() and others
      • 7.7 Visually understand your data
      • 7.8 Other quick inspection functions
      • 7.9 Summary
    • 8. Working with Columns
      • 8.1 Refer to columns
      • 8.2 Create columns
      • 8.3 Reformat columns
      • 8.4 Rename columns
      • 8.5 Remove columns
      • 8.6 Unbound columns
      • 8.7 Summary
    • 9. Working with Rows
      • 9.1 Filtering with brackets
      • 9.2 Filtering with subset()
      • 9.3 Filtering uniques with unique()
      • 9.4 Sorting with order()
    • 10. Manipulating Rows and Columns with dplyr
      • 10.1 sqldf
      • 10.2 dplyr - manipulation verbs
      • 10.3 Application: by-group processing with dplyr
      • 10.4 Summary
  • Part 4 - Shape your Dataset
    • 11. Combine Data Tables
      • 11.1 merge() - vlookup on steroids
      • 11.2 merge() options
      • 11.3 Merging with sqldf()
      • 11.4 Merging with dplyr
      • 11.5 Summary
    • 12. PivotTables - Summarize and Transpose your Data
      • 12.1 Making a simple PivotTable
      • 12.2 Reshaping the table
      • 12.3 Summary
  • Part 5 - Advanced Topics
    • 13. Working with lists
      • 13.1 What is a list?
      • 13.2 Two common uses
      • 13.3 How to get things from lists
      • 13.4 Creating and modifying lists
      • 13.5 Basic list functions
      • 13.6 Summary
    • 14. Programming: Loops and Control Flow
      • 14.1 while() loop
      • 14.2 for() loop
      • 14.3 Breaking out of or skipping loops
      • 14.4 if()
      • 14.5 Summary
    • 15. Writing your own functions
      • 15.1 Simple function - Custom table summary
      • 15.2 More advanced function
      • 15.3 Summary
    • 16. Apply Family of Functions
      • 16.1 lapply(), sapply() and mapply()
      • 16.2 apply()
      • 16.3 Summary
    • 17. Text / String Extraction
      • 17.1 Using substr() to mimic LEFT() and RIGHT()
      • 17.2 Using strsplit() and apply functions
      • 17.3 Regular Expression Text Extraction
      • 17.4 Summary
    • Next Steps

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