20 Useful R Packages You May Not Know About

R packages are a collection of data sets and functions that increase the power of R by adding and improving base R functionalities.

The following are some of the 20 most useful R packages that can be quite beneficial to you.

To Load Data

The Following Are Some Of The R Packages That Can Be Used To Load Data.

1. Odbc- This package can be used to connect R to your database.
2. Haven-You should use this if you want to write and read data from Stata, SPSS, or SAS.
3. DBI- This package connects R to relational database management systems.
4. Foreign – This package comes in handy when you want to load data files from programs such as SAS or SAS.
5. RSOLite and RMySOL– You can use this package to read data from a database.
6. XLConnect– Go for this package if you want to read and write Microsoft Excel files from R.
7. Use R to handle plain text files-   Use functions such as read fwf or read.csv to read plain text files.

To Visualize Data

The following are some of the packages that can be used to visualize data

• ggvis– This is web-based graphics that is interactive and is built with a grammar of graphics.
• ggplot2– You can use this grammar of graphics to create layered and customized plots.
• htmlwidgets– If you want to build visualization with R this is the perfect package for you.
• googleVis– You can use Google Chart tools if you desire to visualize data in R.
• rgl– If you are into 3D visualization, you can use this interactive package with R

To Manipulate Data

1. dplyr-It is a package that can help you to conduct data manipulation
2. tidyverse -A collection of R packages used for data science that share data structure and design philosophy.
3. lubridate- You can use this package to enable you to work with dates and times
4. stringr-Good for character strings and regular expressions.
5. tidyr-Useful package for changing the layout of the data sets.

To Report Results

The following are some of the packages that you can use to report results

1. R Markdown- This package is usually integrated into the RStudio and will be very useful for reproducible reporting.
2. shiny – If you want to share findings you can use this interactive software that has web pages with R
3. xtable-   This program can be paired with R Markdown and can be used to paste an object into any of your documents.

Hope you have benefitted from this awesome list of 20 packages. Give them a try to make your work easier.