Getting started with using R and RStudio (in the cloud or on your own computer)

training
code
Author

Dan Olner

Published

May 16, 2025

Using R and RStudio: (1) posit.cloud in the browser, or (2) running on your own computer

This little guide gets you set up with R and RStudio - either online with posit.cloud through a browser, or with R and RStudio installed on your own computer1 - and talks through opening up a first R script and using it. (If anything doesn’t make sense, do let me know at d dot olner and gmail dot com).

You’ll need to do one of the following:

  1. Use RStudio in your browser with a posit.cloud account. The free version is limited (small memory, for instance) but it’s still a great option for non-intensive task and getting to know R with little effort. The next section below talks through setting up in posit.cloud.

  2. Install R and RStudio on your own computer. If you have a machine where you’re able to install your own software then go here to download/install the right version of R for your operating system, and here to download/install RStudio (again, pick the correct one for your OS). (Though see bullet point 2 below if using a work machine.)

  • The next chunk will talk through setting up a posit.cloud project.
  • The chunk after that talks through getting started with an RStudio project, and will be nearly the same whether you’re using RStudio online or on your machine (with just one tweak, explained in the breakout box).

Any questions/issues, let me know at d dot older at sheffield dot ac dot uk or message me on LinkedIn and I’ll try to answer.

If using RStudio online: set up a posit.cloud account and create your RStudio project

Here’s the steps to get up and running through a browser using posit.cloud.

  • Create an account at posit.cloud - follow that link and use the ‘don’t have an account? Sign up’ box. It’ll ask you to check your email for a verification link, so do that before proceeding.

  • Once verified, go back to the posit.cloud tab and log in. You should see a message: “You are logged into Posit. Please select your destination”. Choose ‘Posit Cloud’ (not Posit Connect Cloud). That’ll take you to your online workspace.

  • Click the new project button, top right

  • Depending on what you want to do, either:

    • If you want the Tidyverse ready to go (but it’s a slightly older R version): select ‘new project from template’ (as in the pic below) and then “Data Analysis in R with the tidyverse” (if not already selected). This template comes pre-installed with the tidyverse package, which we’ll be using. Select then click OK down at the bottom. This will open your RStudio project where we’ll do the coding. NOTE: if I’m posting examples using posit cloud, I’ll let you know if the older R version is a problem. Mostly it’s fine.

    • Otherwise, just select ‘new RStudio project’ for an entirely blank instance of R where you’ll need to install all libraries (but it’s the latest R version).

Make a new R script and add a library

Now you should either be in RStudio online through posit.cloud or if using RStudio installed on your own computer, open that now. From here…

  • Create a new R script by going to ‘file > new file > new R script’ (or using the CTRL+SHIFT+N shortcut). A new script will appear, currently just called ‘Untitled1’ until it’s saved for the first time.
  • At this point, it should look something like this:

Let’s stop for a moment and look at the separate windows in RStudio.

  • Bottom left is the console. Commands run here. You can test it by clicking in the console and trying a random command or two like those below (press enter to run a command in the console).

(Note that all code blocks in this post have a little ‘copy to clipboard’ icon in the top right when you hover, if you want to just copy the code for pasting into RStudio).

2+2
[1] 4

Or e.g.

sqrt(49)
[1] 7
  • Bottom right of the RStudio window has various tabs, including local files (all kept inside your project folder so everything is self contained) and a list of available packages2.
NOTE: IF USING RSTUDIO ON YOUR OWN COMPUTER…

If you’re using posit.cloud, this package comes pre-installed in the template we selected. However, if you’re using RStudio on your own machine, you will need to install the tidyverse package yourself if you want to use it (you probably will).

To do this, just run the following code in the console (the same place we just did our ‘2+2’ test, in the bottom left panel in RStudio.)

install.packages('tidyverse')

You should get a confirmatory message once the package has installed successfully (though it may take a minute or two).

Now, whether in posit.cloud or on your own computer, you should have the tidyverse package available.

It now needs to be loaded as a library before we can use it:

  • Put the following text at the top of the newly opened R script in the top left panel.
library(tidyverse)

When you’ve put that in, the script title will go red, showing it can now be saved (it should look something like the image below).

  • Save the script either with the CTRL + S shortcut, or file > save. Give it whatever name you like, but note that it saves into your self-contained project folder.

Running code in an R script / loading the tidyverse library

All code will run in the console - what we do with scripts is just send our written code to the console. We do this in a couple of ways:

  1. In your R script, if no code text is highlighted/selected, RStudio will Run the code line by line (or chunk by chunk - we’ll cover that in the taster session).
  2. If a block of text is highlighted, the whole block will run. So e.g. if you select-all in a script and then run it, the entire script will run.

Let’s do #1: Run the code line by line.

  • To test this, we’ll load the tidyverse library with the code we just pasted in (which is just one line of code at the moment!) Put the cursor at the end of the libary(tidyverse) line in the script (if it’s not there already), either with the mouse or keyboard. (Keyboard navigation is mostly the same as any other text editor like Word, but here’s a full shortcut list if useful.)
  • Once there, either use the ‘run’ button, top right of the script window, or (much easier if you’re doing this repeatedly) press CTRL+ENTER to run it.

You should see the code get sent to the console, and a message like the one below confirming that R is ‘Attaching core tidyverse packages’. The tidyverse library is now loaded.

── Attaching core tidyverse packages ──────────────────────── tidyverse 2.0.0 ──
✔ dplyr     1.1.4     ✔ readr     2.1.5
✔ forcats   1.0.1     ✔ stringr   1.5.2
✔ ggplot2   4.0.0     ✔ tibble    3.3.0
✔ lubridate 1.9.4     ✔ tidyr     1.3.1
✔ purrr     1.1.0     
── Conflicts ────────────────────────────────────────── tidyverse_conflicts() ──
✖ dplyr::filter() masks stats::filter()
✖ dplyr::lag()    masks stats::lag()
ℹ Use the conflicted package (<http://conflicted.r-lib.org/>) to force all conflicts to become errors

That’s it! Any questions/issues, let me know at d dot olner at gmail dot com or message me on LinkedIn.

Footnotes

  1. Installing R can be tricky on work machines if your organisation isn’t familiar with it. R needs to access the internet to install libraries, for instance, and this can sometimes hit firewall issues. If you end up having this problem, I suggest trying the online posit.cloud route for now.↩︎

  2. You can treat the terms ‘package’ and ‘library’ as interchangeble in R, but if you want to know the reason: if packages are like books, libraries are where the books are stored - we use the same name as the package to load a library. One of many examples of R being unnecessarily confusing with its language!↩︎