How does one reorder columns in a data frame?

Your dataframe has four columns like so df[,c(1,2,3,4)]. Note the first comma means keep all the rows, and the 1,2,3,4 refers to the columns.

To change the order as in the above question do df2[,c(1,3,2,4)]

If you want to output this file as a csv, do write.csv(df2, file="somedf.csv")

# reorder by column name
data <- data[, c("A", "B", "C")] # leave the row index blank to keep all rows

#reorder by column index
data <- data[, c(1,3,2)] # leave the row index blank to keep all rows

You can also use the subset function:

data <- subset(data, select=c(3,2,1))

You should better use the [] operator as in the other answers, but it may be useful to know that you can do a subset and a column reorder operation in a single command.

Update:

You can also use the select function from the dplyr package:

data = data %>% select(Time, out, In, Files)

I am not sure about the efficiency, but thanks to dplyr's syntax this solution should be more flexible, specially if you have a lot of columns. For example, the following will reorder the columns of the mtcars dataset in the opposite order:

mtcars %>% select(carb:mpg)

And the following will reorder only some columns, and discard others:

mtcars %>% select(mpg:disp, hp, wt, gear:qsec, starts_with('carb'))

Read more about dplyr's select syntax.

As mentioned in this comment, the standard suggestions for re-ordering columns in a data.frame are generally cumbersome and error-prone, especially if you have a lot of columns.

This function allows to re-arrange columns by position: specify a variable name and the desired position, and don't worry about the other columns.

##arrange df vars by position
##'vars' must be a named vector, e.g. c("var.name"=1)
arrange.vars <- function(data, vars){
    ##stop if not a data.frame (but should work for matrices as well)
    stopifnot(is.data.frame(data))

    ##sort out inputs
    data.nms <- names(data)
    var.nr <- length(data.nms)
    var.nms <- names(vars)
    var.pos <- vars
    ##sanity checks
    stopifnot( !any(duplicated(var.nms)), 
               !any(duplicated(var.pos)) )
    stopifnot( is.character(var.nms), 
               is.numeric(var.pos) )
    stopifnot( all(var.nms %in% data.nms) )
    stopifnot( all(var.pos > 0), 
               all(var.pos <= var.nr) )

    ##prepare output
    out.vec <- character(var.nr)
    out.vec[var.pos] <- var.nms
    out.vec[-var.pos] <- data.nms[ !(data.nms %in% var.nms) ]
    stopifnot( length(out.vec)==var.nr )

    ##re-arrange vars by position
    data <- data[ , out.vec]
    return(data)
}

Now the OP's request becomes as simple as this:

table <- data.frame(Time=c(1,2), In=c(2,3), Out=c(3,4), Files=c(4,5))
table
##  Time In Out Files
##1    1  2   3     4
##2    2  3   4     5

arrange.vars(table, c("Out"=2))
##  Time Out In Files
##1    1   3  2     4
##2    2   4  3     5

To additionally swap Time and Files columns you can do this:

arrange.vars(table, c("Out"=2, "Files"=1, "Time"=4))
##  Files Out In Time
##1     4   3  2    1
##2     5   4  3    2