From the course: R for Excel Users

Installing R - R Tutorial

From the course: R for Excel Users

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Installing R

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- [Narrator] If you go ahead and start using R as the basis for your numeric analysis, whether in addition to Excel or to use it in place of Excel, you're going to need to have the R software downloaded onto your computer. Let's take a look at how to do that. You're going to use your browser to get to the website named cran.r.project.org. The CRAN acronym is a cryptic way of saying the Comprehensive R Archive Network. And once you've gotten there, you have some choices for download. You could download R for Linux, R for the Mac or R for Windows. I'll go ahead and use the download R for Windows in this case, and we simply click that option. And we get to the subdirectories, one of which is named base. Now, R comes with a base system, which has some degree of analytic functionality built into it and quite a bit of data handling functionality. That's what we'll be downloading to begin with. You get more from R from the contributed packages and we'll be getting into those later on in this series of lessons. At this point, you want to click the link labeled install R for the first time, the link located near the upper right-hand corner of your screen, so I'll do that now. If you already have installed an older version of R on your computer, you might want to have a look at CRAN's homepage which can direct you to some frequently asked questions about R for good advice on updating R. And we're at the download page. The option that we're going to select is download R-4 2.3 for Windows. This is the current release as of the time that I'm recording this. By the time that you're reviewing it, they will probably have come out with a different release, so the version number may be different. That's nothing to worry about. It's normal behavior. At this point, the R installation routine displays an EXE filename in the screen's lower left corner. Single click that filename to start installation. Now, R shows you a several step wizard. In the interest of time, I'm going to skip that because all of your responses will normally be the default that R presents you with. So just go ahead and okay your way through the end of the wizard. Now you have R installed on your computer. Next, let's get a basis for comparison by examining Excel's analysis tool pack add-in.

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