[Rd] Bridging R to OpenOffice

[Leonard Mada]

Dear members of the R Development Team,

I am looking for people with a deep understanding of R internals to 
assist in bridging R to OpenOffice.

While R is a state of the art statistical environment, less experienced 
users often find it difficult to work with R. Therefore, I believe that 
a bridge between R and a spreadsheet program will make this transition 
less painful. I sincerely believe that this will benefit both the R 
community as well as the potential new users.

OpenOffice is an open-source office suite that includes a spreadsheet 
program (Calc).

OpenOffice.org (OOo) is participating in the Google Summer of Code 2007 
initiative sponsored by Google and one of the proposed projects involves 
the creation of an add-on component that allows an OOo Calc user to let 
the R environment do calculations on data from Calc cells and put the 
results into the spreadsheet again. A brief description can be found on 
the OOo Summer of Code wiki page 
(http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Summer_of_Code_2007).

Two students have already shown interest in this project (see the OOo 
mailing list, 
http://sc.openoffice.org/servlets/BrowseList?listName=dev&from=2007-03-01&to=2007-03-31&by=date&first=21&selectedPage=2, 
the "Summer of Code: R and Calc" thread).

While mentoring is already available from a member of the OpenOffice 
team (I will try to offer a helping hand on statistics and R-syntax, but 
NOT the coding part itself), I feel that we still need someone with 
R-core expertise. I am aware of various existing packages (rcom, RDCOM) 
and the availability of various online-informations (like 
http://developer.r-project.org/embedded.html), however more specific 
questions may arise in the future, especially as this embedding should 
be platform-independent, and I would welcome any help from the R-core 
team members.

I am looking forward to hear from you and hope that this project will be 
a great success. I would like to thank you in advance for your effort.

Sincerely,

Leonard Mada