[R] Unequal column lengths

[Tom Mosca]

Hello,

I’ve tried several times to learn R, but have never gotten past a particular gate.  My data are organized by column in Excel, with column headers in the first row.  The columns are of unequal lengths.  I export them as CSV, then import the CSV file into R.  I wish to summarize the data by column.  R inserts NA for missing values, then refuses to operate on columns with NA.  R is importing my data into a data frame, and I realize that is inappropriate for what I want to do.

How can I import my data so that I can work on columns of unequal length?  The first thing I would like to do is generate a table containing mean, median, mode, standard deviation, min, max and count, all per column.

Thank you, Tom

Example data
  Dat1 Dat2 Dat3
1    1    5    4
2    7    7    9
3    3    3    5
4    2   NA  5
5    9   NA NA

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