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12 Frequently asked questions

12.1 Installation Problems

Q: What do I do if I don’t have admin rights and can’t install the newest versions of programs?

A: Depending on your institutional policies and infrastructure, you may not be able to download newer versions of R and RStudio. Firstly, you should contact your IT support person to see whether you are able to access an updated version. While you could attempt to use the older version of these programs available to you, you may notice that some things either look quite different or not work at all. One solution is to use the Posit Cloud platform, as per the instructions in the section Setting up Posit Cloud.

Q: Why did my output have so much red text when I tried to install packages?

A: Rest assured that this is simply the way that R informs you that packages are being installed, even though it may look scary. If there really was an error, the output would likely begin with a message saying “Error: …” or “Warning: …”, to differentiate between informational compared to error messages.

Q: Why did I receive a bunch of error messages when I tried to install packages?

Q: Help! My code isn’t working, even though I’ve followed all the instructions.

A: This is the most common problem you will face, check out the troubleshooting section in the Introductory course on how to solve problems.

Q: Not sure why my R and Git aren’t working well with my project… help!

A: There could be many issues here. One that we’ve encountered is that your file path may have a non-standard/recognizable character in the file path, like the Danish å or æ. Replacing these characters with the “English standard” may solve this problem.