LEFT() and RIGHT() are probably the most used string functions within Microsoft Excel (or other spreadsheet software). Many people who make the transition to R wonder where to find these functions. Short story: they’re not available out-of-the-box. However, why not create them yourself or find a library that suits your…
This is something I bumped into early in my pursuit to become a data scientist, during my Coursera course, somewhere in 2017. I don’t know how I fixed it back then, but it is an issue I will always remember because it took my hours to solve it. In this…
In this blog post, I tackle a question that you recurringly see on a lot of boards. We are going to calculate the cumulative sum, but within a group that the rows belong to. Thanks to vegetableagony for pointing out that, depending on the size of the dataset, other conclusions…
For a personal project, to check how many pictures we took of our cats over the past seven years, I wanted to read EXIF data from my photos. In this blog post I explain how to do it. As you might have guessed, this is not a functionality that’s built…
In this blog post, I elaborate on running an R kernel within a Google Colab notebook and I demonstrate a range of basic functionalities. In the FAQ of Google Colab, you can read that, for now, Google does not support kernels other than Python 3. Although they would like to,…
In my previous post, I explained how you can reorder bar charts based on the frequency of each value. In this blog post, I explain how you can set a custom order. First, let’s load the libraries and create the titanic data set. Assume we want to order our bar…
Plotting bars in ggplot2 is easy. Yet, in many cases, you want to order these bars according to their frequency (count) or according to any other numeric value. In this blog post, I show you three ways to achieve this. First, let’s load the libraries and create the titanic data…
It wouldn’t be the first time that the problem described in this blog post would lead to seemingly magical errors. When your CSV files contain strings (typically IDs) with leading zeroes, they can disappear when you load them to a data frame. Let’s create a data frame and save it…
You might have noticed that the startup speed of RStudio varies. But how can you fix RStudio when its loading time is really, really long? In this blog post I elaborate on the problem and how you can solve it. Everytime you close RStudio while working on your projects, RStudio…
In this blog post I explain how you might be able to fix your CSV files if some of their values contain the same character that is used as delimiter (separator). A problem I recently ran into is that I received a CSV file that contained fields that contained the…
