This week, we really started to dive into R. R is a very powerful statistical analysis tool, and I think after exploring the intricacies of how it operates, I realized the complexities of what it can do. However, there were some real challenges (and still are some real challenges) to pivoting from SAS and Excel to R. With my experience thus far, I’ve found that the syntax is much more sensitive than SAS. R operates at a much more detailed level than SAS and has thousands of packages. We’ve only scratched the surface of packages in R, but learning how to apply the appropriate packages, incorporate R syntax in loops, data manipulation, etc. has certainly been challenging. The other challenge that I encountered was the graphing component. Graphing, while more advanced and specific than SAS, seems to be much more difficult. For example, creating a simple plot with GGplot 2 took some additional research / trial and error before everything came together.
All that being said, I’m looking forward to the challenge of learning R and becoming adept at performing core statistical analysis functions, as this tool / statistical language is used ubiquitously in the workplace for statistical analysis.
