R Commander installation in R on Windows 10

Motivation

Due to the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) and its related disease 😷 COVID-19 employees and students at Wageningen University & Research are all working from home. Students taking Statistical Courses taught by Mathematical and Statistical Methods at Wageningen University & Research will most likely use R. Students enrolled in MAT-14303 Basic Statistics, MAT-15303 Statistics 1, MAT-15403 Statistics 2 and MAT-20306 Advanced Statistics (first two weeks of this course) will use R Commander instead of basic R. Therefore, they will need to install R Commander.

R Commander Installation from the R GUI

Prior requirement:

• R installed on Windows 10

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 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 4.1.1 from the ‘R’ folder in the ‘Start Menu’ as displayed below in Figure 1.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. Repeat step 4. for installing the RcmdrPlugin.HH package. This plugin is required for MAT-15403 Statistics 2 to be able to do the practicals on Simple Linear Regression.

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.