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You can use this page to email John L Taveras about R for Excel Users.

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 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.