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Create your first data.frame()

Data frames are great because of their ability to hold a different type of data in each column. To get started, let's use the data.frame() function to create a data frame of your business's future cash flows. Here are the variables that will be in the data frame:

  • company - The company that is paying you the cash flow (A or B).
  • cash_flow - The amount of money a company will receive.
  • year - The number of years from now that you receive the cash flow.

To create the data frame, you do the following:

data.frame(company = c("A", "A", "B"), cash_flow = c(100, 200, 300), year = c(1, 3, 2))

  company cash_flow year
1       A       100    1
2       A       200    3
3       B       300    2

Like matrices, data frames are created from vectors, so this code would have also worked:

company <- c("A", "A", "B")
cash_flow <- c(100, 200, 300)
year <- c(1, 3, 2)

data.frame(company, cash_flow, year)

This exercise is part of the course

Introduction to R for Finance

View Course

Exercise instructions

  • New company, cash_flow, and year variables have been defined for you.
  • Create another data frame containing company, cash_flow, and year in that order. Assign it to cash You will use this data frame throughout the rest of the chapter!
  • Print out cash to get a look at your shiny new data frame.

Hands-on interactive exercise

Have a go at this exercise by completing this sample code.

# Variables
company <- c("A", "A", "A", "B", "B", "B", "B")
cash_flow <- c(1000, 4000, 550, 1500, 1100, 750, 6000)
year <- c(1, 3, 4, 1, 2, 4, 5)

# Data frame
cash <- 

# Print cash
Edit and Run Code