Without seeing your data it's hard to tell exactly what's going wrong, but you could try something like `mutate(abc = haven::as_factor(col_name))` e.g.:
```r iris %>% mutate(abc = haven::as_factor(Sepal.Length))
# Sepal.Length Sepal.Width Petal.Length Petal.Width Species abc # 1 5.1 3.5 1.4 0.2 setosa 5.1 # 2 4.9 3.0 1.4 0.2 setosa 4.9 # 3 4.7 3.2 1.3 0.2 setosa 4.7 # 4 4.6 3.1 1.5 0.2 setosa 4.6 # 5 5.0 3.6 1.4 0.2 setosa 5 ```

Since R.2.14 (I guess) you can feed your data text representation directly to `read.table`:

df <- read.table(header=TRUE, text="Sepal.Length Sepal.Width Petal.Length Petal.Width Species 1 5.1 3.5 1.4 0.2 setosa 2 4.9 3.0 1.4 0.2 setosa 3 4.7 3.2 1.3 0.2 setosa 4 4.6 3.1 1.5 0.2 setosa 5 5.0 3.6 1.4 0.2 setosa 6 5.4 3.9 1.7 0.4 setosa ")