I use R for data management and ongoing data analysis for amongst other
things, a multi-center medical research project. I have found Google
spreadsheets to be a fantastic way for all collaborators to be on the same
page. Furthermore, Google Forms allows one to capture data from respondents
and effortlessly write it to a google spreadsheet.
Currently, one has to manually download the spreadsheet as a csv file and
then read that into R. Since data changes frequently and is almost never
final it would be far preferable for R to read a google spreadsheet
directly. RODBC package does something similar for Microsoft Access and
Microsoft Excel.

I am a surgeon-scientist whose programing experience is extremely limited.
Is there a willing mentor who would want to take such a project and propose
it for the Google summer of code project?

The mentor could chose his or her scope. For instance at it's most basic the
project's goal could be to simply read a spreadsheet from google spreadsheet
into a R dataframe. The scope could widen to allow R to also write to Google
spreadsheet. If one wanted something even more challenging then one could
create code that allows one to post R script to a R server allowing the
server to read Google Spreadsheets, processes the data and present the
output to a web client.


Farrel Buchinsky

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