Agreed, this was a huge pain point for me early on; I started setting the necessary option to force stringsAsCharacters rather than specifying that arg in read.

Agreed, this was a huge pain point for me early on; I started setting the necessary option to force stringsAsCharacters rather than specifying that arg in read.csv everytime. Edit: I had mentioned data.table as being better than dplyr for performance reasons, but it has a unique learning curve and isn't really good for beginners