ABSTRACT
This chapter describes how to load data into R and perform the various manipulations commonly required by fisheries scientists. Fisheries data are most often rectangular, where variables form the columns, observations on individuals or cases form the rows, and each row contains an entry for each colum. Fisheries data are often entered into a database, which can be loaded directly into R. However, to do so may require configuration of software other than R that are specific to fisheries scientists’ operating system. Text or ASCII files are very simple files that are readable by most text editors, word processors, and spreadsheet software. Data manipulations that can be applied to a single data.frame are illustrated with the bio data. Rules” for creating the desired length intervals may be provided to lencat in several ways. Data.frames may contain more variables than the user is interested in working with.
