The Environment

The Environment pane

The environment pane lives on the upper right-hand side of Rstudio. The environment allows us to see what objects are saved in R as well as quickly preview their contents.

Running the chunk of code below will add a series of objects to the environment that you can then explore.

num_val <- 2 #A single numeric value
char_val <- "frog" # A single character value
num_vect <- c(1,2,3,4,5) # a vector of numbers
df <- data.frame(col_1 = c(1,2,3,4,5), #A dataframe of 3 columns and 5 rows
                 col_2 = c('a','b','c','d','e'),
                 col_3 = c(22.4,23.7,34.2,12.3,45.3)) 
list <- list(num_val,char_val,num_vect,df) #a list that contains all the previous objects

For values and vectors, a preview of the data is simply displayed beside their object name.

For more complex objects, such as dataframes and lists, a preview can be displayed by selecting the circular button with a right-facing triangle to the left of the object.

A complete view of the data can be seen by selecting either the table (in the case of data frames and matrices) or the magnifying glass icon (in the case of lists) to the right of the object.