[R] R reports

[schuster]

I have personal experience with SAS and R people. 

Agreed, there is a huge cultural gap between of SAS (and SAS users) and open 
source / R users and projects. 

In my experience frequently the closed source companies and users of their 
expensive products who reside in their small, comfortable ghetto for extended 
times. Until some other people (like the developers of R) have changed the 
situation enough (in this case on a global basis). Who does not get out much?


On Saturday 21 August 2010 05:09:46 am Donald Paul Winston wrote:
> I should not have used the terms 4GL and 3GL. I'm just looking for a
>  "simple" way to create a report in R. It appears the R way to generate a
>  report is to "roll your own". There is no report() function analogous to
>  plot() (which is very good)  to generate a report from a table of data. I
>  did not mean to say R is not powerful. But it is obvious that using R is
>  much more geeky then using SAS. The ability to generate standard detail,
>  summary, cross-tabs, and control break reports is very important in
>  government and corporate enterprises. The people who develop R and who use
>  it live in a small ghetto and don't get out much.
> 
> On Aug 20, 2010, at 5:33 PM, schuster [via R] wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > are you looking for something like SAS ODS?
> >  (The terms "4GL" and "declarative programming" are confusing)
> >
> > With SAS ODS an output destination is opened at one place oft the program
> > (e.g. HTML or PDF or both), subsequent procedures then write output to
> > the destination(s).
> > The procedures don't have to know about ODS-Output or say what and where
> > to write to, the output is simply caught and written to the output
> > (graphics, tables, results etc.)
> >
> > Finally the output destination is closed and all the collected output
> > will be written to file(s).
> >
> > The principle is similar to the PDF ouptut with plot().
> >
> > In my opinion the idea behind SAS ODS is quite nice. It is a fast way to
> > get output into different file formats. You  can get quick (an dirty)
> > results or apply different styles and formatting options (not always
> > easy).
> >
> > I have not (yet) seen something exactly comparable to this in R (doesn't
> > mean there is not a package for this). Other output options exist (as
> > mentioned): Sweave etc.
> >
> > On Thursday 19 August 2010 01:43:07 pm Donald Paul Winston wrote:
> > > Oops, I meant 4GL. Part of SAS involves more or less "declarative"
> > > coding where SAS figures out how to process the information and you
> > > don't have to. Sweave and html generators in R are not what I'm looking
> > > for. I'm looking for a function whose arguments are data, column names,
> > > grouping variables, summary stats, titles, footnotes, etc. Sort of like
> > > what plot does except the function will generate a report. I suppose
> > > you could specify an output format or "printer device" as plain text,
> > > rich text, pdf, or html.
> 

-- 
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Friedrich Schuster
Dompfaffenweg 6
69123 Heidelberg