[Rd] Bridging R to OpenOffice

[Prof Brian Ripley]

I beieve Leonard Mada intended to contact R-core, from his penultimate 
para (our address is R-core at r-project.org).  I only see any point in 
discussing this on R-devel if some non-R-core-developer wishes to 
volunteer to help -- otherwise R-core will discuss this.


On Wed, 28 Mar 2007, 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!).
>
> Roger
>
>>
>> HTL
>>
>> Leonard Mada wrote:
>>> 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
>>>
>>> ______________________________________________
>>> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
>>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>>
>> ______________________________________________
>> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>>
>
>

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595