Special Data Type—tibbles

The first step in using the tidyverse is moving from the use of data frames to tibbles, which are the tidyverse equivalent of data frames. They clean up some of the legacy behaviors of data frames that can be frustrating in modern data science contexts and give cleaner and easier-to-read outputs.

It’s worth noting, however, that just because something is a tibble doesn’t make it tidy—any tidy or messy data frame can be converted to the tibble format, so we may still need to do some cleaning to meet the criteria for tidy. In doing this tidying, we’ll ensure that tidyverse functions work appropriately on our dataset.