Hi,
It's indeed good practice to create an R-Studio project with a separate folder for each project you have. Let's imagine you have a project set up in the folder C:/Documents/Projects/myProject/. This would be the working directory and all files in that folder can be accessed just by typing their name without the rest of the path (e.g. myProjectFile1.csv).
Referring to files outside the project can be done in two ways:
- Using the full path name of the file. Ex: C:/Documents/Projects/commonFiles/commonFile1.csv
- Specifying the relative path of the file starting from the working directory of the project. Ex: ../commonFiles/commonfile1.csv
The two dots .. in the relative path name mean you have to go 'up a folder' then follow the path as specified by the rest of the folders in the path name. You can go up multiple folders by using the .. several times Ex: ../../otherFolder/ would access a folder named 'otherFolder' in the Documents folder.
*** OPTION 2***
If you find you need all twelve files almost every time in all projects, it could also be useful to save them all in one .RData file. You just load all the files in R in a script, give variable names you would use in every project for these files, and then save them all together as once big .RData file.
In new projects, all you have to do is read in that one R.Data file, and it will 'restore' the twelve variables at once. See this link for more details:
Hope this helps,
PJ