In this book excerpt, learn how to import data into R from spreadsheets, HTML tables, and more.

See how to join two data sets by one or more common columns using base R’s merge function, dplyr join functions, and the speedy data.table package.

The table below shows my favorite go-to R packages for data import, wrangling, visualization and analysis — plus a few miscellaneous tasks tossed in. The package names in the table are clickable ...