[R] spreadsheet addiction

[Marc Schwartz]

On Fri, 2005-01-14 at 16:28 +0000, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
> Henrik Andersson <h.andersson <at> nioo.knaw.nl> writes:
> 
> : 
> : 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 ???
> 
> 
> You could try getting it directly from Excel using R, rather than using
> CSV as an intermediary.  Check out:
> 
> 1. rcom package (http://sunsite.univie.ac.at/rcom/download/)
> rcom has a mailing list at http://mailman.csd.univie.ac.at/pipermail/rcom-l/
> although it seems to be down at the moment.   This allows one to use
> Microsoft COM objects to interface to Excel.  
> 
> 2. RDCOMClient package.  Another Microsoft COM client. 
> 
> 3. RODBC package.  For using the ODBC interface to Excel.
> 
> The last two are on CRAN.  
> 
> The first two also have a number of associated packages that might
> be useful to you too.


Along that same line is the read.xls() function, which is in the 'gdata'
package, which in turn is part of the 'gregmisc' bundle on CRAN.

You would need to install Perl in order for this to work. More
information is here:

http://www.activestate.com/Products/ActivePerl/

HTH,

Marc Schwartz