Organizing your workspace

Good file management is crucial to data analysis, and computer skills in general.

We recommend a simple framework in which data and code (scripts and/or notebooks) are stored in subfolders of a general project or course folder. For instance, if you take STATS-250: Applied Statistics, your folder would like something like this:

stats250
  ├── data
  ├── exams
  ├── labs
  ├── lectures
  └── psets

stats250 is the parent folder or “main directory” (e.g., on your desktop), and all the other folders are children of the parent folder (or “subdirectories”).

R Projects

Even better is to augment this file system by creating a formal project in R, because it makes it easy to work on your course or project in its own R Studio session. It also makes it easy to set your working directory, because by default the working directory is the project folder. A working directory is simply the path or directions to a file on your computer.

For more on R projects read the official documents.

Creating a project

After you create your project your course folder will look something like this:

stats250
  ├── data
  ├── exams
  ├── labs
  ├── lectures
  ├── psets
  └── stats250.Rproj

Video



Opening and closing a project

Now when we want to work on this course, always start by clicking on the stats250.Rproj. This will open a new session of R Studio and automatically set your working directory to the course folder.

When you are done for the day (or night!), close the project from the dropdown menu in the northeast corner of R Studio.

[VIDEO where you open and close a project]