[R] RJDBC to OpenOffice Calc as RODBC to MS Excel

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Fri, 14 Dec 2007, Metz, Thomas (IRRI) wrote:

> Under Windows, I have used RODBC to connect to Excel spreadsheets as per
> the example below:
>
> library(RODBC);
> connect = odbcConnectExcel("testdata.xls");
> query = "SELECT [data$.ethn], [data$.sex], [data$.age],
>                [data$.height], [data$.weight],
>                [label$.label]
>         FROM [data$], [label$]
>         WHERE [data$.ethn] = [label$.ethn];"
> data = sqlQuery(connect, query);
> odbcClose(connect);
>
> [data$] and [label$] are two named sheets in the Excel spreadsheet
> testdata.xls. [.ethn], [.sex], [.age], [.height], [.weight], and
> [.label] are cloumn names that appear in the first row in the sheets. I
> can also have UNION queries that allow me to overcome the spreadsheet
> row limitation of a single sheet. The idea is to allow normalization of
> data in a spreadsheet and leveraging the power of SQL, without using a
> database.
>
> Can the same be done under Windows (Linux?) with OpenOffice Calc using
> RJDBC? Are there ODBC drivers for OpenOffice Calc?

An awful lot of that is Microsoft warts on SQL, so it will not be 
portable.  But in a more standard syntax (drop the [] and $) it should be 
doable over any connection that supports SQL queries.

The question is whether OO calc has suitable drivers as an ODBC/JDBC 
server.  Not a question for this list!  (I suspect the answer is no: 
Microsoft's drivers effectively use the Access engine to work with 
spreadsheet files and even plain text.  I don't even see drivers for OO 
base.)

> I know that the right solution would be to use a database, but this is
> outside the comfort zone of many users who rely mainly on spreadsheets
> to collect, manipulate and analyze their data.
>
> Thomas Metz
> International Rice Research Institute
> Philippines

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595