Your First Time Opening RStudio

RStudio is an IDE that was built with R programming in mind. Understanding a tool is the best way to use it effectively. Luckily for us, RStudio is extremely user friendly.l

Before we start, you can always use the R console if desired. To open it, you can search your computer for your R.exe application. Once opened, it should look like the below image. Check out this other tutorial if you have not installed R or RStudio yet.

Now that you are aware of the R Console, lets switch to RStudio. When you open RStudio for the first time, you will see something like the below image.

Before I explain each section, please click File — New File — R Script at the top left of RStudio. Alternatively, you can enter Ctrl+Shift+N to open a new R Script. This will open a new section that displays your current file being worked on. In total, there are 4 main sections of RStudio.

The below table summarizes each of the main sections.

RStudio also offers a lot of useful cheat sheets. You can find them by clicking Help (top of the screen) — Cheatsheets. A relevant one for this article is the RStudio IDE cheat sheet shown below. Click here to search through all the RStudio cheat sheets.

Cheers!