[R] spreadsheet addiction

[Marc Schwartz]

On Fri, 2005-01-14 at 12:37 +0100, Henrik Andersson wrote:
> I am moving to using R more and more as a computational platform and
> I use Microsoft Excel at the moment in exactly the way you describe in 
> WRITING ASCII FILES as a staging area for data, to gather data and make 
> simple calculations. I've have experienced problems with saving to .csv 
> files, and not only using scientific notation. The problem occurs also 
> in normal notation if you choose to show only some decimals.
> 
> That is a serious problem, what is the remedy?
> 
> To always avoid showing only some decimals and avoid scientific notation 
> or does someone have a  better solution, like a global option, Save with 
> full represention to .csv.
> 
> I'm open for all sorts of suggestions, including ditching Excel...and 
> use ???
> 
> Cheers, Henrik

If you need to use a spreadsheet, for whatever reason, under Windows, I
would suggest going to OpenOffice.org:

http://www.openoffice.org/

When I was still running under Windows, I had notable problems saving
sheets to CSV files using Excel. There would not only be issues with
numeric formats, but also in dealing with blank cells. The latter
resulting in an incorrect number of fields being created in the CSV
file. This caused problems upon importing to R (ie. using read.csv())
whereby the number of fields in the header row did not match the number
of fields in all of the data rows.

OO.org's calc is _not_ better then Excel for actual analyses, since they
are focused on matching Excel functionality, but for this one feature,
it is far better IMHO.

You might also want to keep an eye on Gnumeric, which is in the process
of developing a Windows version:

http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric/

HTH,

Marc Schwartz