The table below shows my favorite go-to R packages for data import, wrangling, visualization and analysis -- plus a few miscellaneous tasks tossed in. The package names in the table are clickable if you want more information. To find out more about a package once you've installed it, type help(package = "packagename") in your R console (of course substituting the actual package name ).

A few important points for newbies. To install a package from CRAN, use the command install.packages("packagename") -- of course substituting the actual package name for packagename and putting it in quotation marks. Package names, like pretty much everything else in R, are case sensitive.

To install from GitHub, you can use the install_github function from the remotes package, using the format remotes::install_github("githubaccountname/packagename").

In order to use a package's function during your R session, you need to do one of two things. One option is to load it into your R session with the library("packagename") or require("packagename"). The other is to call the function including the package name, like this: packagename::functioname(). Package names, like pretty much everything else in R, are case sensitive.

Want to learn more about handling data with R? See 4 data wrangling tasks in R for advanced beginners.