1.2 Why R and RStudio?

In the EVISUstudy of the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, experts from the field were asked how and where they perform energy analyses and create visualizations. The result was that many people today either need Excel or use a building monitoring software to execute analysis and as well for making visualizations.

Excel users are pushing the program to its limits with the ever-increasing data sets. Also the interactive ability of the graphics there is limited. Switching to an analysis environment like “R” seems unavoidable for more complex tasks, but apparently causes problems for many people. In the market there are numerous books which make the start in “R” easier. There are also packages for various fields which support the discipline-specific analysis and visualization tasks.

However, experts from the energy and building services engineering industry lack a corresponding work and corresponding packages. The present book is intended to close the first gap, the second gets closed by the package redutils - Energy Data Utilities for R.

You might also wonder why R and not Python. Well, this is a question of faith and the author seems to prefer R.