• Cost: Free
• Difficulty: Hard
• Flexibility: High

The R Programming Language can be downloaded from https://cran.r-project.org/mirrors.html.

The RStudio IDE can be downloaded from https://www.rstudio.com/products/rstudio/download/.

Google Data Studio and Tableau are both very intuitive tools, specializing in ease of use over flexibility and power. With that said, the R Programming Language allows users to create very specialized visualizations but demands a steeper learning curve than Google Data Studio and Tableau. R is a free software environment as well as an open source programming language for statistical computing and graphics. Unlike other programming languages such as Java, C++, and Python, R is maintained by the R Foundation for Statistical Computing. This ensures that R's focus is on statistics, data analysis, and visualization. Because of this, R is favored by statisticians, data analysts, and data scientists. R also features a large number of packages for data manipulation and visualization. This example uses a package called bigrquery, which is a wrapper for the Google BigQuery API. bigrquery can query, run jobs to create tables and views, and extract table data to/from Google Cloud Storage. The other package used is called ggplot2, which is one of R's most used visualization packages. The ggplot2 package can be used to create a number of different visualizations of R data with a large amount of customization. We would also strongly advise the use of the RStudio IDE as it is an excellent tool for data analysis and visualization.