Installing packages

A package is a collection of functions and tools that expands R’s baseline functionality. Packages are written by authors and developers from around the world, and are made available for free on CRAN (the Comprehensive R Archive Network).

Installing packages

To install a package with the name package_name, type the following into your console and hit ENTER:

install.packages("package_name")

Don’t forget to put the package name in double quotation marks.

You only need to install a package in your R Studio Cloud workspace once. Therefore, it’s best not to include install.packages in your scripts, but instead run it from the console.

Loading packages

To load an installed package with the name package_name, include the following line of code at the top of your script:

library(package_name)

You don’t need to put the package name in double quotation marks here.

As a best practice, load all your packages at the top of your script, after rm(list=ls()) but before any other commands.

Packages in this class

These are the packages we’ll make use of in this class:

  • dplyr: A package containing many useful data management tools. Stands for “data pliers”.
  • ggplot2: A package containing many useful data visualization tools.
  • lfe: A package containing many useful regression tools, specifically for running regressions with a large number of dummy variables.
  • stargazer: A package for reporting the output of regressions in a nicely formatted way.