At the top of the tibble it tells us the size. The first number is the rows and the second is the columns.
In the above example we have:
10 rows/observations
7 columns/variables
Rows/observations
As in a data.frame each observation is within its own row. The contents of an observation/row is determined by your dataset and how you want to analyse or visualise it. There are many ways to manipulate tibbles with the dplyr, tidyr, and other tidyverse packages.
Tibble rows do not have row names and you cannot/should not give them row names. They are numbered/indexxed instead.
Variables/columns
A tibble will have a certain number of columns.
Each column has a name that is at the top. For example:
year
watershed
elevation
Below the column/variable names is the data class/type of the column. All the entries within a single column will have the same data class. These include:
<date>: Date (MG ADD LINK TO INFO ABOUT DATE CLASS, MOST LIKELY IN LUBRIDATE SECTION)
<list>: List
Below is an example of a tibble with a column for each of these classes.
# A tibble: 4 × 7
Integers Doubles Characters Factors Logicals Dates Lists
<int> <dbl> <chr> <fct> <lgl> <date> <list>
1 101 0.345 One A TRUE 0001-01-20 <dbl [3]>
2 21 3.14 sentence B TRUE 0002-01-20 <dbl [3]>
3 3 78.9 is B FALSE 0003-01-20 <dbl [3]>
4 0 20001. enough A FALSE 0004-01-20 <dbl [3]>
Above you can see that when you view a tibble, by printing it or viewing it in an Rstudio tab, it will align the values in the columns in a easy to read manner. This is especially useful for numeric (integers & doubles) columns where the numbers are aligned by place value. This allows you to easily compare the size of numbers in the same column.