2.8 Installing Rattle on Windows

If you come across any problems installing Rattle on Windows see Section 2.9.

For Windows we need a little more effort to install R. Below is the process, step-by-step, to augment the details from Section 2.1 and Section 2.2. A key part of this is to update what is called an environment variable with the name PATH. This is to tell Windows the location where you have installed R so that Rattle can find R.

  • Visit https://cloud.r-project.org/ and navigate to Windows install;
  • Click on Download R for Windows and then install R for the first time and then the Download R-n.n.n for Windows (noting the version number n.n.n will be something like 4.4.1, for example);
  • Open the downloaded exe file and install R with all defaults into C:\Program Files\R\R-n.n.n;
  • Add C:\Program Files\R\R-n.n.n\bin to the PATH environment variable:
    • Open Control Panel and choose Edit the system environment variables;
    • Click Environment Variables…;
    • Under User variables for … click the Path entry and then Edit…;
    • Click New and then add C:\Program Files\R\R-4.4.1\bin;
    • Click OK a few times to close the windows.
  • Start a Command Prompt, run R, and install the requisit R packages with the install.packages() command:
install.packages(c("Hmisc", "VIM", "corrplot", "descr", "fBasics",
                   "ggthemes", "janitor", "magrittr", "mice",
                   "pacman", "randomForest",  "rattle", "readr",
                   "reshape", "rpart", "skimr", "tidyverse", "tm",
                   "verification", "wordcloud"))
  • You will be asked Please select a CRAN mirror for use in this session and its okay to go with 0-Cloud [https]. The installation can take 5 or more minutes, depending on your Internet connection.

Test that this works for the normal user by starting up the Command Prompt, running R, and then, for example library(pacman).

We are now ready to install Rattle.

Download the zip archive:

You can also download the zip archive from the command line if you have wget installed:

wget https://access.togaware.com/rattleng-dev-windows.zip -O rattleng-dev-windows.zip

Open the file and double tap on the rattle app. You will be asked to Extract all. You could extract it to a new folder called rattle on your Desktop but it can be anywhere. You can add the unzipped path to the system PATH environment variable or create a shortcut to add to your desktop.

Now start up the unzipped rattle and you will see the Windows protected your PC message. Tap the More info link to then Run anyway.

If the code execution cannot proceed because MSVCP140.dll was not found (and a few others) then install this Microsoft Visual C++ library from https://aka.ms/vs/16/release/vc_redist.x64.exe. Rattle should then start up next time you start it.

On the first startup, after loading a Dataset, check the Console tab and wait until it shows the dataset summary there. Rattle may find the need to install the requisite R packages if not already installed and this could take 5 minutes, depending on your Internet connection and CPU speed. You can view the installation progress in the Console tab. After the install it is best to close Rattle and open it again.


Your donation will support ongoing availability and give you access to the PDF version of this book. Desktop Survival Guides include Data Science, GNU/Linux, and MLHub. Books available on Amazon include Data Mining with Rattle and Essentials of Data Science. Popular open source software includes rattle, wajig, and mlhub. Hosted by Togaware, a pioneer of free and open source software since 1984. Copyright © 1995-2022 Graham.Williams@togaware.com Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0