Applied Data Skills
Processing & Presenting Data
Overview
This book provides an overview of the basic skills needed to turn raw data into informative summaries and visualisations presented in professional reports and presentations. The book will introduce learners to R (R Core Team, 2023), a programming language that can help automate working with data. The book will cover importing and processing data from spreadsheets, producing data summaries of descriptive statistics in tables, creating beautiful and informative visualisations, and constructing reports and presentations that automatically update when the underlying data changes.
By the end of this book, you will be able to use R to:
- Import, clean, and manipulate real-world datasets using R programming.
- Create fully reproducible data reports, demonstrating clear and ethical documentation of data processing and results.
- Effectively visualise data to communicate findings to both technical and non-technical audiences.
- Apply data skills to address socially relevant questions, with consideration of sustainability and impact.
- Reflect on personal skill development and the role of data in driving informed decisions.
This book was created using R version 4.5.1 (2025-06-13 ucrt) (Great Square Root) and RStudio version 2025.5.1.513 (Mariposa Orchid). It was rendered with quarto version 1.8.21. Most of the content of this book will work fine in versions of R above 4.0 and earlier versions of RStudio, although there may be some small differences in the interface.
This is the 3rd version of the book and is currently under revision. You can access previous versions at: v1 and v2.
Structure of the course
This book accompanies a 10-week course, covering one chapter per week. Each chapter will introduce you to some new skills and concepts using concrete examples. At various points, there will be multiple-choice or fill-in-the-blank questions for you to check your understanding. Each chapter also has accompanying exercises that you should do to reinforce your learning. If you are enrolled on PSYCH1012 Applied Data Skills, you will complete these exercises in the second workshop each week as a pair programming exercise.
How to learn data skills
Learning data skills is kind of like having a gym membership - you’ll be given state-of-the-art equipment to use and instructions for how to use them, but your data skills won’t get any stronger unless you practice.
Data skills do not require you to memorise lots of code. You will be introduced to many different functions, but the main skill to learn is how to efficiently find the information you need. This will require getting used to the structure of help files and cheat sheets, learning how to Goggle your problem and choose a helpful solution, and learning how to read error messages.
Learning to code involves making a lot of mistakes. These mistakes are completely essential to the process, so try not to feel too frustrated. Many of the chapter exercises will give you broken code to fix so you get experience seeing what common errors look like. As you become a more experienced coder, you might not make fewer errors, but you’ll recover from them much faster.