Go to the free download location on RStudio’s website: RStudio will use R automatically and you won’t ever have to interact with it directly. Once R and RStudio are both installed, you can ignore R and only use RStudio. Next, you need to install RStudio, the nicer graphical user interface (GUI) for R (the dashboard). If you use macOS, download and install XQuartz. Click yes through all the prompts to install like any other program. If you use Windows, click “base” (or click on the bolded “install R for the first time” link) and download it.ĭouble click on the downloaded file (check your Downloads folder). pkg file in the list of files (in this picture, it’s R-4.0.0.pkg as of right now, the current version is also 4.0.0) and download it.

If you use macOS, scroll down to the first. Go to the CRAN (Collective R Archive Network) 1 website: Ĭlick on “Download R for XXX”, where XXX is either Mac or Windows:

Here’s how you install all these things Install Rįirst you need to install R itself (the engine). This is also important if you want to customize fonts, since RStudio.cloud has extremely limited support for fonts other than Helvetica. Over the course of the semester, you should wean yourself off of RStudio.cloud and install all these things locally. RStudio.cloud is convenient, but it can be slow and it is not designed to be able to handle larger datasets, more complicated analysis, or fancier graphics. If you don’t get this link, let me know and I will invite you. You’ll receive a link to join the shared class workspace separately. This means you won’t have to install anything on your computer to get started with R! We will have a shared class workspace in RStudio.cloud that will let you quickly copy templates for labs and problem sets. To make life easier, you can (and should!) use the free RStudio.cloud service initially, which lets you run a full instance of RStudio in your web browser. R is free, but it can sometimes be a pain to install and configure.

Think of R as an engine and RStudio as a car dashboard-R handles all the calculations and the actual statistics, while RStudio provides a nice interface for running R code. You will use RStudio as the main program to access R. You will do all of your work in this class with the open source (and free!) programming language R.

Rstudio free download