[R] R and Excel

[ohri2007 at gmail.com]

Even using the VBA back of Excel to create interfaces with R would
make a lot of sense. Suppose I could have access to VBA macros that
import and export data into R , it would be great.

The R GUI series like Rattle come even closer to Excel...so a VBA
_R_ExCel package might  be useful to ordinary folks .

Besides Excel costs money, so adding R functions to Open Office would
help both of them ( if not attempted already)

Regards,

Ajay

www.decisionstats.com

On 1/8/09, Stavros Macrakis <macrakis at alum.mit.edu> wrote:
>>
>> "Some people familiar with R describe it as a supercharged version of
>> Microsoft's Excel spreadsheet software..."
>>
>
> It is easy to ridicule this line from the NYT article.  But this is not only
> a very sensible comment by a smart reporter, but also one that is good for
> R:
>
> It is good for R because it explains the new (R) in terms of the familiar
> (Excel).  Of course R can do far more than Excel ever could, but most
> readers will not be familiar with boxplots, let alone studentized bootstrap
> confidence intervals, yet R is useful even for elementary analyses.
>
> It is good for R because it will bring us new users.  I have often looked
> over the shoulders of Excel users struggling to do analyses or construct
> graphics that are just slightly beyond what Excel makes easy. Perhaps the
> dataset is too large, or the analysis doesn't fit into the spreadsheet
> model, or the analysis isn't built-in (and so requires either many manual
> steps, or Visual Basic programming, or an expensive add-on package), or it
> requires data sources that Excel doesn't handle well, or it has gotten so
> complicated that it is unmaintainable in spreadsheet form.  R scales better
> in every way: in size of problem, in complexity of analysis, in data
> sources.
>
> It is good for R because it makes it sound unthreatening and easy, both for
> the person who might consider using R rather than Excel, and for his/her
> management.  Of course, R is not trivial to learn, but you don't have to
> master everything about it to get useful results (just like Excel, I might
> add).
>
> It is good for R because it reminds us that there are other useful computing
> paradigms that we can learn from. The spreadsheet model, including instant
> update, is compelling for a wide range of problems.  I have not used any of
> the R/Excel interface packages, but presumably they combine the advantages
> of the approaches. Perhaps there is room for not just integrating R with
> Excel, but for incorporating the core ideas of Excel into R in some
> intelligent way.
>
> It is good for R because it shows areas where R can be improved.  Excel
> makes it very easy to present tabular data and format it.  It makes it very
> easy to work with summary/contingency tables (pivot tables) interactively
> and only a little more difficult to do drill-down.  In all cases, its
> functionality is limited, but what it can do, it does well.
>
> It is good for R because it reminds us that there are many people using
> other tools who could benefit from outreach from the R community, both
> through tools (smoother interoperability) and through education.
>
> All in all, characterizing R as a supercharged version of Excel makes a lot
> of sense.
>
>          -s
>
> 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>
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-- 
Regards,

Ajay Ohri
http://tinyurl.com/liajayohri