[R] easing out of Excel

[Greg Snow]

>>> "Paul Sorenson" <Paul.Sorenson at vision-bio.com> 01/19/05 03:18PM >>>
>> 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?

Since you are looking for summaries within groups, you should look at
the
lattice package and some of the plots that you can produce with it
(maybe
for each product line you can produce a lattice/trellis graph with each
panel
representing a region and different colors symbols within panels to
represent
different customers).

If we had more of an idea of what you are looking for, we could give
better
suggestions.


>> 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

It looks like you want the reports fully automated and the final result
as HTML
(to be viewed with a browser), I suggest you look at the R2HTML package
and
the sweave function (this lets you write a report in HTML with r-code
in place of 
graphs and output, then a quick run through sweave and you have a final
report
in HTML ready to be viewed).

There are also several tools available for running R through CGI, go
to: 
http://www-r.project.org/ and click on "R web-servers" under the
"Related Projects"
heading in the left column to get details.

Hope this helps,


Greg Snow, Ph.D.
Statistical Data Center
greg.snow at ihc.com
(801) 408-8111