Downloading R and R Studio (Windows)
Thank you so much for your continued support! By coming to
this site, you have taken the necessary steps to improve your standard of
living, and your lives, and I couldn’t be prouder of you! You have summoned the
strength to continue down such a difficult road that many, unfortunately, don’t
have the courage to walk, and YOU should be proud of yourselves.
I am assuming if you are looking at this post that you have
completed the first 3 stages of my curriculum, and if you have, you are
amazing. If you haven’t, you are still amazing.
In this post, I am going to walk you through a series of
installation steps for you to download R language and R Studio onto your
Windows machine.
R is a language that facilitates statistical computation
methods that you will find very useful in data analytics. And R Studio is the
IDE, or integrated development environment, in which you will do all of your
data analysis. And I do mean ALL of your analysis! There are thousands of
packages that you can load into your environment that will make most tasks
relatively painless. You will be able to run just about every mathematical
function, and even create visualizations which will help you understand the
data.
So, for this post, you will be installing:
- R
- R Studio
You will need a Personal Laptop. If you need guidance on
which laptops to purchase, I have created a post for that which I will link here.
I recommend a Windows laptop. So, NOT a Mac if you can
help it.
Here are the steps to installing R:
1. Open your preferred web browser—I use Google Chrome—and
type in “R cran.” The first link that will appear at the top of the browser
will be something like “https://cran.r-project.org.”
It will be the link that says, “The Comprehensive R Archive Network.” Click on
that link.
2. Navigate to the top of the page where it says, “Download
and Install R.” Click where it says “Download R for Windows.” It is highlighted
in blue.
3. Click on the option that says “base,” which will state
that this download has “binaries for base distribution. This is what you want
to install R for the first time.”
4. Click where it says, “Download R for Windows.” At the time
of this post R is currently running version 4.1.3, so the version that you will
download will be a later version, most likely. Your computer should be
downloading the installation wizard, which you can view in the lower left
portion of your screen.
5. Click on the file with your mouse and select “open.” You
can also navigate towards your “downloads” folder. The installation wizard is
likely to be at the top.
6. ALLOW for Windows to run the wizard. Select English as
your Language.
7. For the General Public License Page, click Next.
8. Windows will assign R to be stored in a default folder.
This is fine for our purposes, so click Next.
9. For the Select Components page, click Next.
10. For Start Up Options, the “No (Accept Default)” should be
selected, then click Next.
11. Windows will create a short cut where R will be stored,
click Next.
12. For the Select Additional Tasks Page under the
“Additional Shortcuts” option, click the one box called “Create a Desktop
Shortcut,” and then click Next.
13. At this point, R will begin installing on your computer.
This might take a minute.
14. A window that says the installation is finished will
appear, so click Finish.
Perfect! Now that R is installed, we can install R Studio,
which is the interface we will use that supports R programming.
Here is how to install R Studio:
1. Choose your favorite website browser and type the
following: “R Studio.” It should be the first option at the top of the results
page, something like: https://www.rstudio.com.
Click it.
2. Along the top banner, hover your mouse over “Products.”
3. Select and click “R Studio: The Premier IDE for R.”
4. Scroll down and click the “R Studio Desktop” icon.
5. Under the Open-Source Edition, scroll down and click the “Download
R Studio Desktop” button.
6. On the next page, under the “R Studio Desktop Free” click
the download button.
7. The site will bring you to the Download page, so you will
click where it says, “Download R Studio for Windows.”
8. The installation wizard will begin downloading, click on
the icon when the downloading finishes, and select “open.”
9. Click “yes” when Windows is asking “Do you want to allow
this app to make changes to your device.”
10. When the set-up is loaded, click Next.
11. Where it says, “install location,” Windows will assign R
Studio to a destination folder. This is perfectly fine; you don’t need to make
any changes to this. Click Next.
12. Finally, you may click Install.
13. The installation will take time, maybe three or four
minutes to install R Studio. It is a large file.
14. When the installation has completed click Finish. Then
manually restart your computer. Restarting your computer is essential for the
software to function appropriately.