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

Lesson 2 Importing Data You cannot do much of interest in R without data. Typically, your data is stored in some kind of information system. But, with a bit of skill and luck, you can typically export ...

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

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.