R Commander installation in R on Windows 10/11

Image credit: Panos Sakalakis on Unsplash
Table of Contents

Motivation

Whether working or studying everybody uses various sorts and types of software on their computer. Students taking Statistical Courses, as taught by the Mathematical and Statistical Methods group at Wageningen University & Research, will most likely use R. Students enrolled in MAT14303 Basic Statistics, MAT15303 Statistics 1, MAT15403 Statistics 2 and MAT20306 Advanced Statistics (first two weeks of this course) will use R Commander instead of basic R. Therefore, they will need to install R Commander.

This post will show how to install R Commander within R on a privately owned desktop or laptop computer running Windows 10/11 as operating system.
The installation instructions in this post are not to be used on WURclient desktops or laptops! For a WURclient desktop or laptop see the post: R Commander installation in R on a WURclient computer.

R Commander Installation from the R GUI

Students, who installed R by using the WUR AppStore, can skip the installation of R Commander. The WUR AppStore version of R already contains everything to run R Commander.

This post is only intended for students, who followed the Manual Installation of R.

Prior requirement:

To be able to install R Commander you will need to have R installed first. If you haven’t done so already, please first install R on your Windows 10/11 computer (use the link above to go to that specific post).

This post was originally based on R version 3.6.3. For newer versions of R the steps described are the same, only some screens you will see during your installation will display a higher version number of R compared to the screenshots in this post.

  1. Start R x64 4.3.1 from the ‘R’ folder in the ‘Start Menu’ as displayed below in Figure 1.
Start Menu R x64
Start Menu R x64
  1. The R GUI (graphical user interface) will open and the cursor will be ready for input behind the prompt, as indicated by the > sign. Use the mouse pointer and navigate to the top menu and select ‘Packages’ > ‘Install Package(s)…’ as shown in Figure 2.
R GUI Install Packages
R GUI Install Packages
  1. Now a CRAN (Comprehensive R Archive Network) mirror needs to be selected, from which packages will be installed. Select, as shown below in Figure 3, the top one ‘0-Cloud [https]’. This to make sure, that always the nearest CRAN mirror will be used no matter where you will be on the globe 🌍. Click on the ‘OK’ button to confirm the selection.
R GUI Select CRAN Mirror
R GUI Select CRAN Mirror
  1. After the CRAN mirror selection a list of available packages will appear. Scroll down to find the Rcmdr package and click it to select. As shown below in Figure 4 the package will turn blue, when selected. Confirm the installation by clicking the ‘OK’ button. Now a lot will happen in your display while the Rcmdr pacakage and its dependencies are being installed.
R GUI Select the Rcmdr package to be installed.
R GUI Select the Rcmdr package to be installed.
  1. Repeat step 4. for installing the RcmdrPlugin.HH package. This plugin is required to be able to do assignments about Simple Linear Regression.
Once the installation of the RcmdrPlugin.HH package has finished, you are ready 😆 to start R 4.3.1 and use R Commander.
When using R Commander for the first time additional packages, required for R Commander to work correctly, will need to be installed. Allow the installation to be able to work smoothly without errors!

Starting and restarting R Commander

Start R Commander

To start R Commander type the library(Rcmdr) command behind the R Console prompt (indicated by a > sign) and press return (↩) to execute the command.

Restart R Commander

In case R Commander crashes while using it, you will need to resart it. However, in the R Console currently running R, the library(Rcmdr) command will not restart R Commander.

The reason is, that the R Commander package is still loaded and first needs to be detached. To detach the R Commander package you can copy (Ctrl+C) the following command:

detach("package:Rcmdr", unload = TRUE)

paste (Ctrl+V) it behind the prompt in the R Console (indicated by a > sign) and press return (↩) to execute the command.

Now R Commander can be restarted by using the library(Rcmdr) command as before.

Maikel Verouden, Ph.D.
Maikel Verouden, Ph.D.
Researcher | Lecturer | IT & Organization contact person

My research interests include Statistics, Teaching and programmable matter (statistical software).