[R] R report generator (for Word)?

Mon Jan 2 13:45:17 CET 2012

Dear Michael,

Our current work flow is to use Sweave and LaTeX. If Word output is needed we convert the LaTeX files to html using htlatex (installed with MikTex). Those html files can be opened with ms word. 

Best regards,

Thierry

ir. Thierry Onkelinx
Instituut voor natuur- en bosonderzoek / Research Institute for Nature and Forest
team Biometrie & Kwaliteitszorg / team Biometrics & Quality Assurance
Kliniekstraat 25
1070 Anderlecht
Belgium
Thierry.Onkelinx op inbo.be
www.inbo.be

To call in the statistician after the experiment is done may be no more than asking him to perform a post-mortem examination: he may be able to say what the experiment died of.
~ Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher

The plural of anecdote is not data.
~ Roger Brinner

The combination of some data and an aching desire for an answer does not ensure that a reasonable answer can be extracted from a given body of data.
~ John Tukey

-----Oorspronkelijk bericht-----
Van: r-help-bounces op r-project.org [mailto:r-help-bounces op r-project.org] Namens Joshua Wiley
Verzonden: zondag 1 januari 2012 21:32
Aan: Michael
CC: r-help
Onderwerp: Re: [R] R report generator (for Word)?

Hi Michael,

I like Sweave and LaTeX, but I can appreciate the difficulty using it with collaborators.  What about something similar using HTML?
Certainly integrates to any webpages nicely.  There are two packages I think do this nicely, one is the R2HTML package (on CRAN).  Another one that is not on CRAN yet, but I think has a lot of potential is the knitr package.  You can find it on github.

I am not personally familiar with any good ways to integrate R with MS Office products.

Cheers,

Josh

On Sun, Jan 1, 2012 at 7:50 AM, Michael <comtech.usa op gmail.com> wrote:
> Happy New Year all!
>
> I am looking for a good solution for keeping record of my experiments 
> - could you please help me?
>
> My work is about analysing data... My current work-flow:
>
> 1. Everyday my bosses give me some small steps/tasks for analysing 
> data - which are parts of one bigger/whole project.
> 2. Everyday I send tens of emails to bosses/colleagues to report my 
> findings in each step.
> 3. Bosses/colleagues often respond to my findings in real-time and 
> suggest new experiments/steps and ask "what-if" questions.
> 4. I often have to manually copy and paste the results from R console 
> and put them into an Excel and decorate a bit and send out.
> 5. Every one week and 2 weeks, we need to present to more senior 
> bosses with more nice-looking presentations which is a summary of our 
> findings in those 1-2 weeks. It's this time that is most chaotic 
> because my colleagues and I have to dig into all the hundreds of 
> emails in the past 1-2 weeks and copy and paste and organize those 
> data again and make a nice overall summary for presentation...
> 6. As I am a hard-working guy, I myself often run my own random/ad-hoc 
> experiments using out-of-work time and whenever I have interesting 
> findings, I will send to immediate bosses and colleagues to seek their 
> comments.
> 7. All these experiments are in fact variations of different 
> versions/ideas of one big/whole project. Lets say in one big project 
> bosses/colleagues and I have come up with a few big ideas, then we have a few sub-projects:
>
> MyProjectIdea1
> MyProjectIdea2
> ...
> MyProjectIdeaN
>
> And each idea has a few variations, mostly are for answering "what-if"
> questions by varying the parameters here and there ...
> For example:
>
> MyProjectIdea1_Variation1_WhatIfParam1ChangedTo1.2?
> ...
> ...
> etc.
>
> 8. Most experiments run tens of minutes to many hours... and some of 
> them have to run on Linux, and some others can be run on Windows. 
> Fortunately we have universal paths accessible on both Windows and 
> Linux, so those won't be problem...
>
> 9. Because of the time-consuming nature of these experiments, I also 
> save the images as "rData" whenever I can. However, it's necessary to 
> keep track of the context where these data were generated. Otherwise 
> even the records of these images won't help recall the scenario we have run...
>
> ---------------------------------------------------
>
> Keeping track of these changes and all kinds of "what-if"s now becomes 
> increasingly a problem for me.
>
> Some times in order to respond to a query, although I have done it 
> before already, but because I didn't keep record and save the result, 
> or even though I have saved the memory image yet I am not completely 
> sure about the "cleanness" of the results/data,I have to redo it and 
> wait for another few hours.
>
> Is there a way that I can manage these whole processes better and be 
> more productive?
>
> I have been digging and thinking about this for while and I guess 
> Sweave is the right way to go?
>
> The problem for Sweave is that it's hard to make Latex generated pdf 
> appealing to business managers... so if I keep records in Sweave/Latex 
> for my own record/benefit (that's already a big benefit)... I still 
> need to somehow manually copy/paste the data from Sweave/Latex/pdf 
> into Word/Excel/Powerpoint in order to make a nice presentation...
>
> I know there are some Open Office and Word version of Sweave... the 
> problem is that I couldn't find many demonstrations on these topics 
> and my question
> is: are they good and can they fulfill what we needed?
>
> Your thoughts are greatly appreciated!
>
> Thanks a lot!
>
>        [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>
> ______________________________________________
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--
Joshua Wiley
Ph.D. Student, Health Psychology
Programmer Analyst II, Statistical Consulting Group University of California, Los Angeles https://joshuawiley.com/

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