Reading & Writing data

Section 1.7 Reading & Writing data

So far, we have created our own data in R or used datasets that are prebuilt in R. Most of the time, you will have data that is not currently in R, but you want/need to bring it into R to do an analysis.

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In the case when you have your own data on your computer that you want to bring into R, there are two main ways:

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read.csv(): Imports a CSV file into R.
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read_xlsx(): Imports an excel file into R (from the package readxl, but more about packages later).
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getwd(): Gets the path of the directory you are working in.
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setwd(): Sets the path in your directory that you want to work in.
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Below is code to assist with uploading data.

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# read.csv example (commented because path varies by machine)
# my_df <- read.csv("/path/to/your/file.csv")

# Working directory helpers
# getwd()
# setwd("/path/where/you/want") # <- avoid hard-coding in projects; we'll cover R Projects later
#setwd("~/Documents/Work/Brooklyn College/Fall 2025")

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