[R] Table of basic descriptive statistics like SPSS

[ukoenig at med.uni-marburg.de]

Dear list readers,
I want to:

1. Get a table of basic descriptive statistics for my variables
with the variable names one below the other
like SPSS descriptive statistics:

Varname N Min Max Mean SD
xxxx    x  x  x    x   x
xxx     x  x  x    x   x
....

2. Delete some variables from a data frame or exclude variables
from beeing analyzed.

3. Create a text file / redirect the terminal output to a
file (it is supposed to be easy, but I could not find a solution)?

4. Create a latex/dvi file

5. Create a PDF file (can that be done within R?)

This code took me some ours (I am new to R). What do you think about
my solution? Are there easier ones? Comments welcome! Sorry if
my questions look very basic and I hope they are understandable.


#here is my code
setwd("c:\\temp") #set working directory

library(psych)
library(xtable)
library(tools)

#Create example data frame with many variables
df <- as.data.frame(matrix( rnorm(1000), ncol=100))

df <- describe(df) #describe from lib psych

#How Can I create a text file with the output of "describe"?
#The "save as" function from the GUI saves
#only last part of the output to a text file (the first part is cut)


#delete some variables. Or can I exclude variables from
#beeing analyzed by "describe" to reduce the numer of cols?
df$kurtosis <- df$skew <- df$se <- NULL

x.df <- xtable(df) #Create an xtable object
print(x.df, tabular.environment = "longtable", , floating = FALSE,
      file="c:\\temp\\descript.tex") #create latex file

# produce dvi file in working directory (from tools)
texi2dvi("c:\\temp\\descript.tex")  #the lines below have to be added

#Problem: these lines have to be added "manually" to the latex
#before calling "texi2dvi":

#\documentclass{article}
#\usepackage{longtable}
# Latex code
#\end{document


#Can I prodcuce a PDF file within R?


Thanks a lot in advance!
Udo