[Rd] Bridging R to OpenOffice

[Sean Davis]

On Wednesday 28 March 2007 09:20, Stefan Zimmermann wrote:
> Still didn't get the point, or missed the topic ?

I had gotten the point, yes--just trying to be helpful.  I'm sorry it wasn't 
taken as such. 

Sean


> It's OpenOffice.org and R not Excel and R, two totally different
> products at least from a philosophical standpoint. Not everybody is
> willing to pay license fee for Excel to be able to use R via a GUI.
> That's how the idea was born to integrate or bridge R with
> OpenOffice.org Calc
> Access statistical data analysis functionality computed by the almighty
> R engine from menues in Calc, and getting the results back in Calc (more
> for users than for developers). A plugin could do the job.
> There is no point in saying "there is something in Excel" like there is
> none in saying "Why not using "S" ?
> You may want to follow the link, offered by Leonard, to the "Google
> Summer of Code"-project which is menthored by Sun Microsystems
> (Star/OpenOffice developers), to get a clearer picture about it.
> http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Summer_of_Code_2007#Integration_of
>_R_into_Calc
>
> best regards
> Stefan
>
> Sean Davis said the following on 28.03.2007 12:48:
> > On Wednesday 28 March 2007 06:25, Roger Bivand wrote:
> >> On Wed, 28 Mar 2007, Hin-Tak Leung wrote:
> >>> Hmm, if all you are interested is reading/writing Excel spreadsheets
> >>> from R, there are much lighter and easier ways of doing it, than
> >>> hooking up with openoffice. The Perl people have had
> >>> Spreadsheet::ParseExcel and Spreadsheet::WriteExcel for years (and
> >>> they work quite well, personal experience). Those are tiny
> >>> (a couple of Mb's?) compared to the size of openoffice.
> >>
> >> I don't think this is the problem here - the proposal says: "Create an
> >> add-on component that allows a Calc user to let the R environment do
> >> calculations on data from Calc cells and put the results into the
> >> spreadsheet again". It feels much more like embedding R in the OO
> >> spreadsheet and/or elsewhere, which would be similar to using DCOM in
> >> Excel. There would also be questions about how tightly integrated an
> >> embedded R should be, how functionality would be provided and
> >> documented, and how such a setup ought to be administered and
> >> maintained.
> >>
> >> As RExcel, the structure depends crucially on having joint expertise in
> >> place to write and maintain the R script glue (dialogues) to provide the
> >> functionality being added to Calc. Typically, this would be something an
> >> organisation of some size might need, but it would be unlikely to be a
> >> GUI for novice R users unwilling to scale the learning curve (a steep
> >> learning curve, of course, means learn a lot in a short time, hence a
> >> good thing!).
> >
> > There are examples of doing this with Excel, which have been quite
> > successful. Here is at least one example (which I post for potential
> > contact information):
> >
> > http://linus.nci.nih.gov/BRB-ArrayTools.html
> >
> > Sean
> >
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