[R] Cleaning up messy Excel data

[John C Nash]

When I was still teaching undergraduate intro biz-stat (among that community it is always
abbreviated), we needed to control the spreadsheet behaviour of TAs who entered marks into
a spreadsheet. We came up with TellTable (the Sourceforge site is still around with refs
at http://telltable-s.sourceforge.net/), which put openoffice calc on a server and made
sure change recording was on and the menu to switch off change recording was removed. It
is used over a web browser with a VNC client. Neil Smith wrote a Java application to view
all the changes by who, what, when etc., and we discovered the infrastructure was quite
nice for running any single user app in a shared mode with version control. However, with
Google Docs, we realized we could try to make money or enjoy life, and so the project is
now moribund. However, the ideas are there, and if anyone gets interested, I'll be happy
to try to dig up materials, though I suspect that it would be easier to work with the
ideas and more modern tools.

The key idea is that there is just ONE master file, and that there is some discipline over
keeping that file OK. My opinion is that this concept could be exploited much more for
lots of different situations, but it seems that cloud technology is being used to create
lots of versions of files rather than consolidate and control such files.

JN


On 03/03/2012 06:00 AM, r-help-request at r-project.org wrote:
> Message: 76
> Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2012 20:04:05 -0500
> From: jim holtman <jholtman at gmail.com>
> To: Greg Snow <538280 at gmail.com>
> Cc: r-help <r-help at r-project.org>
> Subject: Re: [R] Cleaning up messy Excel data
> Message-ID:
> 	<CAAxdm-6VzxcLi4Mr0GUkwGe5EVA0-Gx03FRUey9Ej3CaJY4hag at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
> 
> Unfortunately they only know how to use Excel and Word.  They are not
> folks who use a computer every day.  Many of them run factories or
> warehouses and asking them to use something like Access would not
> happen in my lifetime (I have retired twice already).
> 
> I don't have any problems with them "messing" up the data that I send
> them; they are pretty good about making changes within the context of
> the spreadsheet.  The other issue is that I working with people in
> twenty different locations spread across the US, so I might be able to
> one of them to use Access (there is one I know that uses it), but that
> leaves 19 other people I would not be able to communicate with.