Getting Help in R

The help system within R is comprehensive. There are several ways to access help:

Click on the ‘Help’ menu. There are a number of options available (depending upon your OS) but the main documentation is in the form of HTML.

If you want help on a specific command you can enter a search directly from the keyboard:

help(keyword)

A shortcut is to type:

?keyword

This is fine if you know the command you want. If you are not sure of the command you can try the following:

apropos(“part.word”)

You type in a part.word and R will list all commands that contain that string of letters. For example:

apropos(“rank”)
[1] “count.rank” “dsignrank” “psignrank” “qsignrank” “rsignrank” “rank”

This shows that there are actually 6 commands containing “rank”; you can now type help() for any of those to get more detail.

If you run the HTML help you will see a heading entitled “Packages”. This will list the packages that you have installed with R. The basic package is ‘base’ and comes with another called ‘stats’. These two form the core of R. If you navigate to one of those you can browse through all the commands available.

R comes with a number of data sets. Many of the help topics come with examples. Usually these involve data sets that are already included. This allows you to copy and paste the commands into the console and see what happens.