I created the following document for the graduate students in my multilevel modeling course. It includes tips of common data cleaning strategies that are helpful when trying to prepare data in R. Some of the recommendations are specific for multilevel modeling, but many of the tools are useful for single level data as well.
I've learned about these different functions over several years, and it has been a long journey integrating all of them together to create my current R coding workflow (you'll see the chaos of the journey if you ever check out my code on OSF... the beauty of growth!).
Learning R can be slow on a good day and exhausting on a typical one. I hope by sharing this, all the time I've lost can save some for you! :-)