Introduction I first heard about R when I was in graduate school in 2008 and fellow students used it to analyze their data. I didn’t bother to learn it at the time because, one, I didn’t see the benefit of it, and two, I assumed that without any programming experience, it was too difficult. So I continued with my same workflow: Clean data and make charts in Excel, import data into SPSS to analyze it, and then paste my output into a Word document and write up the results.