摘要:Welcome to the first issue of a regular series of R Help Desk columns. As the title of the column suggests, it is intended to present answers to frequently asked questions related to R, for example well known questions from the R mailing lists. More specifically, the intention is to address problems which cannot be described and explained completely in a few lines of text, as it is common in manuals, help pages, typically styled answers on mailing lists, or the R FAQ (Hornik, 2002). So, on the one hand, articles published in this column are intended to present solutions to common problems. On the other hand, to be easy to read by less experienced R users, the articles should not be too technical.