Great R packages for data import, wrangling and visualization

Computerworld:
Here are my go-to R packages -- in a handy searchable table.

One of the great things about R is the thousands of packages users have written to solve specific problems in various disciplines -- analyzing everything from weather or financial data to the human genome -- not to mention analyzing computer security-breach data.

[ Need to learn R or brush up on basics? Download our free Beginner's Guide to R or the Advanced Beginner's Guide to R ]Some tasks are common to almost all users, though, regardless of subject area: data import, data wrangling and data visualization. The table below show my favorite go-to packages for one of these three tasks (plus a few miscellaneous ones tossed in). The package names in the table are clickable if you want more information. To find out more about a package once you've installed it, type help(package = "packagename") in your R console (of course substituting the actual package name ).

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