Getting Started With the R Commander: A BasicStatistics Graphical User Interface to R

Abstract. Unlike S-PLUS, R does not incorporate a statistical graphical user interface (GUI), but it does include tools for building GUIs. Based on the tcltk package (which furnishes an interface to the Tcl/Tk GUI builder) the Rcmdr package provides a basic-statistics graphical user interface to R called the “R Commander.” The design objectives of the R Commander were as follows: to support, through an easy-to-use, extensible, cross-platform GUI, the statistical functionality required for a basic-statistics course (though its current functionality has grown to include support for linear and generalized-linear models); to make it relatively difficult to do unreasonable things; and to render visible the relationship between choices made in the GUI and the R commands that they generate. The R Commander uses a simple and familiar menu/dialog-box interface. Top-level menus include File, Edit, Data, Statistics, Graphs, Models, Distributions, and Help, with the complete menu tree given in the paper. Each dialog box includes a Help button, which leads to a relevant help page. Menu and dialog-box selections generate R commands, which are recorded in a log/script window and are echoed, along with output, to an output window. The log/script window also provides the ability to edit, enter, and re-execute commands