How to Use R Programming in Google Colab

R can run in Google Colab. It’s Just A Matter of Switching Runtimes. Here’s how.

R programming is separate from the IDE, so there are other options than RStudio. Google Collab is one of them.

Most R programming developers, data analysts, and data scientists are used to programming with Rstudio, seeing the IDE in many videos when learning the language. RStudio is the default choice for creating data models in R.

However, they tend to forget that R programming is a standalone language that runs in the terminal. Other IDEs can access R programming and display the results. It is possible to do so in Visual Studio code and Jupyter, for example.

It is also possible to do it with Google Colab, the cloud notebook IDE. The steps to do so are very simple.

Setting Up In Google Colab

The first step is to open a notebook in Google Colab and then navigate to the Runtime selection in the menu. In this step, you will have to change the runtime from Python to R so that the programming sections added to your notebook will run as a R program. Select “Change runtime type” in the menu.