19 Getting help

If you don’t know or can’t remember what a function does, R provides help files which explain how they work. To access a help file for a function, just type ?command in the console, or run ?command command within an R block. For example, running ?mean would bring up the documentation for the mean function.

You can also type CRTL-Shift-H while your cursor is over any R function in the RStudio interface.

It’s fair to say R documentation isn’t always written for beginners. However the ‘examples’ sections are usually quite informative: you can normally see this by scrolling right to the end of the help file.

Finding the backtick on your keyboard

The backtick ``` symbol is unfamiliar to some readers. Here’s where it is:

On windows

On a Mac