Instead of choosing between the two extreme ends of the spectrum, Clicking Buttons vs. Writing Code, you can use a tool like Exploratory (https://exploratory.io) (Disclaimer, I’m a co-founder of Exploratory), which provides a modern and interactive UI to access to all the amazing things of R without needing to write R code. You can get immediate value out of R in the first few minutes with its grammar based (dplyr verbs) data wrangling and beautiful and interactive visualization. Everything you do in Exploratory is recorded as R function that you see in UI so you can learn R while you work on data, and you can export your analysis works as reproducible R scripts. Many of our users use Exploratory to not just learn R, but also learn data analysis / science methods, which to me is more important than learning the tools themselves.