Setting Up a Working Directory in R

When beginning to work with R code, the first thing that you need to do is setup a working directory. A working directory is a location on your computer from which R will read and write files to. You can choose any location/folder on your computer where you want to save your code and set that as the working directory.

The following example shows how to set the working directory in R to the folder "C:\r-programming\data" on the C drive in Windows.

1# Set the working directory
2setwd("C:/r-programming/data")
3

Note: You need to first create a directory called r-programming and then another directory within it called data. Check that you are able to access this directory C:/r-programming/data from Windows Explorer. Once the directory exists, you will be able to use the command to set that as the working directory.