[R] Application design.

[Richard M. Heiberger]

Since your boss is Excel based, you might want to give the appearance
of staying in
that environment.  Take a look at RExcel and RWord, both at rcom.univie.ac.at
RExcel is a seamless integration of Excel and R.

See the book R through Excel that Erich Neuwirth (the author of
RExcel) and I wrote.
http://www.springer.com/mathematics/computational+science+%26+engineering/book/978-1-4419-0051-7

Rich

On Mon, Jul 21, 2014 at 10:24 PM, John McKown
<john.archie.mckown at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm designing an R based application for my boss. It's not much, but
> it might save him some time. What it will be doing is reading data
> from an MS-SQL database and creating a number of graphs. At present,
> he must log into one server to run a vendor application to display the
> data in a grid. He then cuts this data and pastes it into an Excel
> spreadsheet. He then generates some graphs in Excel. Which he then
> cuts and pastes into a Power Point presentation. Which is the end
> result for distribution to others up the food chain.
>
> What I would like to do is read the MS-SQL data base using RODBC and
> create the graphs using ggplot2 instead of using Excel. I may end up
> being told to create an Excel file as well.
>
> My real question is organizing the R programs to do this. Basically
> what I was thinking of was a "master" program. It does the ODBC work
> and fetches the data into one, or more, data.frames. I was then
> thinking that it would be better to have separate source files for
> each graph produced. I would use the source() function in the "master"
> R program to load & execute each one in order. Is this a decent
> origination? Or would it be better for each "create a graph" R file to
> really just define a unique function which the "master" program would
> then invoke? I guess this latter would be a good way to keep the
> workspace "clean" since all the variables in the functinon would "go
> away" when the function ended.
>
> I guess what I'm asking is how others organize the R applications. Oh,
> I plan for this to be run by my boss by double clicking on the
> "master" R source file, which I will associate with the Rscript
> program in Windows. Yes, this is Windows based <sigh/>.
>
> Appreciate your thoughts. Especially if I'm really off track.
>
> --
> There is nothing more pleasant than traveling and meeting new people!
> Genghis Khan
>
> Maranatha! <><
> John McKown
>
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