Part 2 Download R, then RStudio

2.1 How and from where

You can view videos on how to download R and RStudio here: http://go.hawaii.edu/wKf . On that web page, go to the Set Up panel on the left side of the web page to see the videos. The URLs that the video mentions are here: https://cloud.r-project.org/ for downloading R and here, https://www.rstudio.com/products/rstudio/download/ for downloading RStudio.

When you download RStudio, the free open-source license version is all you need. This is labeled as “RStudio Desktop” and is for laptops and desktops.

2.2 Look at RStudio’s environment

Once you have downloaded R and RStudio, you can work in RStudio and forget about the actual R application (until you update it in a few months).

For now, to see what it looks like, open RStudio in the same way you’d open other new programs on your machine (such as through the Start menu on a PC).1 You’ll see four panes.

The four panes of the RStudio environment are the script editor, the environment et al., the console., et al., and the files, et al.

If you don’t see the script editor pane, you can create a new script. Click File, then New File, then R Script.


You can rearrange the panes, change the size of each, and click on the tabs within each pane to view the contents.

Arranging panes by dragging borders to resize panes and clicking the minimize and maximize icons.


The icon with four boxes within it is for rearranging panes. Sometimes, we might want to have the console (the output) on the right):

Click the grid icon to select Console on Left or Console on Right.

  1. In your usual workflow, you can open RStudio by clicking on an R file in a local directory on your machine, such as from within a folder you have created for a lesson in our class. We’ll do this next.↩︎