George Mount | R for Excel Users - First Steps | RStudio Meetup

Abstract:
Excel's built-in programming language has served as an entry point to coding for many. If you’re a data analyst steeped in Excel, chances are you could also benefit from learning R for projects of increased scope and complexity.

This presentation serves as a hands-on introduction to R for Excel users:

How R differs from Excel as an open source software tool
How to translate common Excel concepts such as cells, ranges, and tables to R equivalents
Example use cases that you can take and apply to your own work
How to enhance Excel and Power BI with R
By the end of this presentation, you will have a clear path forward for building repeatable processes, compelling visualizations, and robust data analyses in R.

Speaker Bio:
George Mount is the founder of Stringfest Analytics, a consulting firm specializing in analytics education and upskilling. He has worked with leading bootcamps, learning platforms and practice organizations to help individuals excel at analytics. George regularly blogs and speaks on data analysis, data education and workforce development. He is the author of Advancing into Analytics: From Excel to Python and R (O’Reilly).

Link to George's white paper “Five things Excel users should know about R”https://stringfestanalytics.com/five-things-r-excel/

Working group sign-up for those interested!

Within many organizations Microsoft Excel is a preferred tool for working with data for non data analytics users. In order to build a data driven organization, source data and analytical models must be accessible to all data users (technical and non-technical) within their preferred tool. Let’s rally the R community to welcome Excel users into our data driven culture by building an Excel add-on to access data and models available within RStudio. If you're interested in continuing this conversation and joining a working group, let us know! rstd.io/excel-r-community

Links shared at the meetup!
✨ George's GitHub/ Presentation Resources: https://github.com/stringfestdata/rstudio-mar-2022

✨ Packages? Where to find them & recommendations:
CRAN Task Views: https://cran.r-project.org/web/views/
Mark shared: for folks who primarily use excel to present formatted tables, the `gt` package is a great way to start doing this programmatically in R: https://gt.rstudio.com/
Ivan shared: In addition to regular Google, I'd recommend https://rseek.org/, given that the character 'R' is sometimes not search friendly :)
Jeff shared: Fpp2 is great for forecasting and time series analysis - https://otexts.com/fpp2/
Floris shared: https://otexts.com/fpp3/
Ivan shared: If you're into tidyverse, there's an equivalent for time-series: https://tidyverts.org/
George shared: https://dplyr.tidyverse.org/
Ryan shared: This can be a helpful package for dynamically editing tables, like in excel https://github.com/DillonHammill/DataEditR
Ryan shared: This is a great package for making and learning ggplot visualizations: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/esquisse/vignettes/get-started.html

✨ Other resources:
Monaly shared: There is a R help group: r-help@r-project.org
George shared: Helpful book/site on statistics: https://moderndive.com/
Ryan shared:Harvard has a good online source (free options) that has a number of classes, the following for stats: https://www.edx.org/professional-certificate/harvardx-data-science
George shared: R for Data Science free book: https://r4ds.had.co.nz/
Fernando shared: big book of R https://www.bigbookofr.com/index.html
Floris shared: Advanced R Book: https://adv-r.hadley.nz/
Pedro shared: The R for Data Science Slack channel is a great learning resource! r4ds.io/join (we just made a channel there called #chat-excel_to_r
Ivan shared: For teams who are deeply entrenched in Excel (like my old team), this tool may be useful - https://bert-toolkit.com/. It allows running R code in .xls, so you can learn R while doing .xls :)

✨ Re: Glossary of terms:
Ivan shared: inner_join() is like VLOOKUP in .xls.
Dan shared: Here's one cheat sheet (glossary of Excel to R) that I just found; https://paulvanderlaken.com/2018/07/31/transitioning-from-excel-to-r-dictionary-of-common-functions/

✨ Extra Meetup Links
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Talk submission: rstd.io/meetup-speaker-form
If you'd like to find out about upcoming events you can also add this calendar: rstd.io/community-events
RStudio conference/submit a talk: https://www.rstudio.com/conference/
Recordings of all meetups: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9HYL-VRX0oRKK9ByULWulAOO5jN70eXv

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