Packages in R

Overview

Teaching: 5 min
Exercises: 0 min

Questions

• How do I install packages?

• How do I get help with packages?

Objectives

• Can install and load packages.

• Understands how to find help with packages.

Packages extend the functionality of base R by providing additional functions, datasets, and tools for specific tasks or domains. It is important that you are conscious that there may be specific versions of the R language and package versions required to use multiple packages simultaneously (version compatibility). It is recommended that you keep packages up to date wherever possible as new versions normally include bug fixes, performance improvements and new features. We should have already installed all the packages that we need for this course based of the pre-worksheet. However, as a reminder:

install.packages(“package_name”)

Installation only needs to be done once no matter how many projects you start. To use the package in RStudio, you need to ensure that you type:

library(package_name) 

Note:
This will need to be added to the beginning of every script that needs this package

Help with packages

Many packages come with vignettes (tutorials and extended example documentation). Without any arguments, ‘vignette()’ will list all vignettes for all installed packages, ‘vignette(package=’package-name’)’ will list all available vignettes for ‘package-name’, and vignette(‘vignette-name’) will open the specified vignette. If a package doesn’t have any vignettes, you can usually find help by typing help(‘package-name’).

vignette("ggplot2")

Key Points

• There are many packages with a wide range of features, becoming adept at utilising packages is key to getting the most out of R