[R] easing out of Excel

[Paul Sorenson]

I know enough about R to be dangerous and our marketing people have asked me to "automate" some reporting.  Data comes from an SQL source and graphs and various summaries are currently created manually in Excel.  The raw information is invoicing records and the reporting is basically summaries by customer, region, product line etc.

With function such as aggregate(), hist() and pareto() (which someone on this list kindly pointed me at) I can produce something roughly equivalent to the current reports.

My question is, are there any neat R "lock out" features people here like to use on this kind of info, particularly when the output is very visual (report is intended for marketing people).

Another way of looking at this is, What kind of "hidden" information can I extract with R that the Excel solution hasn't touched?

For example, even the pareto plot mentioned earlier is something the Excel guys haven't thought of or can't easily produce.

regards

BTW the tool chain I am using goes something like:
	Production (run daily):
		DB -> SQL/python -> CSV -> R/python -> images -> network
	Presentation:
		network -> CGI/python -> browser