[Rd] Bridging R to OpenOffice

[Marc Schwartz]

On Wed, 2007-03-28 at 17:25 +0200, Peter Dalgaard wrote:
> Sean Davis wrote:
> > 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
> >   
> I feel (without much hard evidence to build the feeling on...) that the
> main issue is that OOo isn't making it really clear what the preferred
> embedding/interfacing methods should be. I did look into the related
> issue of database connectivity at some point; toying with the idea of
> using oobase or oocalc as a backend for RODBC, but apparently no  ODBC
> interface exists. (The other way around is possible: using oobase as a
> front end for e.g. mysql via ODBC).

OO.org's Base is an embedded HSQLDB java based database application
(http://hsqldb.org/). 

To my knowledge it does not support ODBC, but at least in the
'non-embedded' versions, there is a JDBC interface available.

This issue comes up periodically on the OO.org lists, which I tend to
peruse and occasionally post to via gmane.

For whomever might pursue this, there is a list of OO.org projects here:

http://projects.openoffice.org/index.html

including sections for API's etc.

HTH,

Marc