The tidyverse family of packages

tidyverse is a collection of packages that collectively work to make processing and transforming data a lot easier. These are all included in our hanoverbase package.

This online book is a great resource for learning more about this suite of packages.

Here is a brief listing of these packages and what they enable us to do:

• ggplot2 offers support for graphs. The ggformula package we have seen uses it behind the scenes.
• dplyr offers functionality for manipulating a dataset: changing variables, creating new variables from existing ones, aggregating, etc.
• tidyr helps us bring a dataset into a more standardized form: reshaping between “long format” and “wide format”, breaking a column into two or more columns based on the values, etc. It is often the first step after importing a new dataset from Excel or some similar source.
• readr is a set of utilities for reading in datasets of various file formats.
• tibble is an alternative representation of datasets, that is used under the hood by all the other libraries.
• stringr provides tools for breaking a string into pieces, and is helpful when different pieces of information have been encoded in variable names.
• forcats provides utilities that work with factor (categorical) variables.

Some other packages are:

• readxl and haven, used to read Excel documents and SAS/SPSS/Stata documents respectively.
• googledrive can be used to connect to files in Google Drive.
• There are also other more specialized packages for web scraping, connecting to web APIs, databases, reading XML or JSON files, and more.