From Excel to R: Three Examples

Abdul Majed Raja has a few examples of things which are easy to do in Excel and how you can do them in R:

Create a difference variable between the current value and the next value
This is also known as lead and lag – especially in a time series dataset this varaible becomes very important in feature engineering. In Excel, This is simply done by creating a new formula field and subtracting the next cell with the current cell or the current cell with the previous cell and dragging the cell formula to the last cell.

These things aren’t as easy to do as in Excel—it’s hard to get simpler than “push a button” or “click and drag your mouse”—but they are useful to know in R. H/T R-bloggers