One of the ways people organize their work in R is through the use of R projects. A built-in functionality of R Studio that helps to keep all your related files together. R Studio provides a great guide on how to use projects. So, definitely check that out. First off, what is an R project? When you make a project, it creates a folder where all files will be kept, which is helpful for organizing yourself and keeping multiple projects separate from each other. When you reopen a project, R Studio remembers what files were open and will restore the work environment as if you have never left, which is very helpful when you are starting backup on a project after some time off. Functionally, creating a project in R will create a new folder and assign that as the working directory so that all files generated will be assigned to the same directory. The main benefit of using projects is that it starts the organization process off right. It creates a folder for you and now you have a place to store all of your input data, your code and the output of your code. Everything you are working on within a project is self-contained, which often means finding things is much easier. There's only one place to look. Also, since everything related to one project is all in the same place, it is much easier to share your work with others either by directly sharing the folders slash files, or by associating it with version control software. We'll talk more about linking projects in R with version control systems in a future lesson entirely dedicated to the topic. Finally, since R Studio remembers what documents you had opened when you close this session, it is easier to pick a project up after a break. Everything is set up just as you left it. There are three ways to make a project. First, you can make it from scratch. This will create a new directory for all your files to go in. Or you can create a project from an existing folder. This will link an existing directory with R Studio. Finally, you can link a project from version control. This will clone an existing project onto your computer. Don't worry too much about this one. You'll get more familiar with it in the next few lessons. Let's create a project from scratch, which is often what you will be doing. Open R Studio and under "File," select "New Project." You can also create a new project by using the projects toolbar and selecting new project in the drop-down menu, or there is a new project shortcut in the toolbar. Since we are starting from scratch, select "New Directory." When prompted about the project type, select "New Project." Pick a name for your project and for this time, save it to your desktop. This will create a folder on your desktop where all of the files associated with this project will be kept. Click create project. A blank R Studio session should open. A few things to note. One, in the files quadrant of the screen, you can see that R Studio has made this new directory, your working directory and generated a single file with the extension, "R project". Two, in the upper right of the window, there is a project's toolbar that states the name of your current project and has a drop-down menu with a few different options that we'll talk about in a second. Opening an existing project is as simple as double clicking the R Project file on your computer. You can accomplish the same from within R Studio by opening R Studio and going to file then open project. You can also use the project toolbar and open the drop down menu and select "Open Project." Quitting a project is as simple as closing your R Studio window. You can also go to file "Close project," and this will do the same. Finally, you can use the project toolbar by clicking on the drop down menu and choosing closed project. All of these options will quit a project and doing so will cause R Studio to write which documents are currently open so they can be restored when you start back up again and it then closes the R session. When you set up your project, you can tell it to save environment. So, for example, all of your variables in data tables will be pre-loaded when you reopen the project, but this is not the default behavior. The projects toolbar is also an easy way to switch between projects. Click on the drop-down menu and choose "Open Project" and find your new project you want to open. This will save the current project, close it and then open the new project within the same window. If you want multiple projects open at the same time, do the same, but instead, select "Open Project in New Session." This can also be accomplished through the file menu, where those same options are available. When you are setting up a project, it can be helpful to start out by creating a few directories. Try a few strategies and see what works best for you. But most file structures are set up around having a directory containing the raw data. A directory that you keep scripts slash R files in, and a directory for the output of your code. If you set up these boulders before you start, it can save you organizational headaches later on in a project when you can't quite remember where something is. In this lesson, we've covered what projects in R are. Why you might want to use them, how to open, close or switch between projects and some best practices to best set you up for organizing yourself.
