As you can see, tibbles behave better than data frames. We get column type information immediately. Additionally, when you display a tibble in a console, print or head() output fits on one screen, so we can easily see the content. Information about the data's dimensions is displayed in the first row. This ease of use is one of the big advantages of tibbles.

One more problem with base data frames is that when you read data from a file, all character (text) columns get converted to factors. You have to use stringsAsFactors = FALSE to change the default behavior of R. Tibbles, on the other hand, do not do this conversion. With tibbles, character columns stay character columns upon import. We'll discuss reading data from files later in the course.