To view a list of vignettes associated with a package (for example, dplyr), enter the following command in any R console:

vignette(package = "dplyr")

You can also use:

browseVignettes("dplyr")

To see a specific vignette, use:

vignette("dplyr", package = "dplyr")

You can omit the package option when a vignette is uniquely named, and many packages (by convention) contain an introductory vignette that shares the package’s name. (I.e., vignette("package_name") will often work like you’d expect.)

So what’s a vignette?

Vignettes are long-form guides to packages¹ and are installed onto your system along with the rest of the package’s code and documentation. I’ve known this for a while—I even wrote one for my first R package—but I never took the time to learn how to access them locally; instead I’ve always just looked at the list of vignettes on a package’s CRAN page (which is what you need to do if the package isn’t installed already).

Now that I’ve taken a moment to figure out how to use R’s vignette functions, this is already saving me time. But it’s also useful in other circumstances, such as writing code without reliable internet², when the installed version of a package doesn’t match the latest version on CRAN, or for using packages that haven’t been listed on CRAN.