A workspace is a collection of saved objects (data, functions,...) and reflects the state of R at a given moment. In our example the workspace is called world. When R starts it automatically loads the default R workspace simple called .RData (in a default folder); if you wish to reuse the same data in a future session, just save your current workspace.

Although in our example the workspace only contains some data on countries, it is not simply a data file or worksheet you would use with SPSS or EXCEL (containing a single data set), but a collection of all kinds of R objects, for our purpose here mostly data. In our example workspace world contains a data frame (data matrix) named world (R calls it a data frame), other data types are the usual mathematical objects (scalars, vectors, matrices). You can see the contents of an object, by simply typing its name, here world