Hi Stephen,

You don't say what "staging" is - do you mean for data entry or loading a
data file for review, or ... ?

In general, I keep away from Excel for data transfer purposes. It tends to
make "intelligent" decisions on data types leading to strange & bizarre
results (unless you explicitly type each column - which most users don't
do). Integers are interpreted as dates, high order zeros are stripped off of
ZIP codes, and the like.

HTH,
Jim Porzak
TGN.com
San Francisco, CA
http://www.linkedin.com/in/jimporzak
useR Group SF: http://ia.meetup.com/67/


On Mon, Oct 20, 2008 at 11:27 AM, stephen sefick <ssefick@gmail.com> wrote:

> I am wondering if there is a better alternative than Excel for data
> storage that does not require database knowledge (I will eventually
> have to learn this, but it is not on my immediate todo list).  I need
> something that is not limited to 256 columns... I don't need any of
> the built in functions in excel just a spreadsheet like program with
> cells that hold data in a data.frame format for a staging area before
> I get it into R.  Any help would be greatly appreciated.  This is not
> a direct r question, but all of you folks have more experience than I
> do and I am having a time finding what I need with google.
> thanks in advance
>
> --
> Stephen Sefick
> Research Scientist
> Southeastern Natural Sciences Academy
>
> Let's not spend our time and resources thinking about things that are
> so little or so large that all they really do for us is puff us up and
> make us feel like gods.  We are mammals, and have not exhausted the
> annoying little problems of being mammals.
>
>                                                                -K. Mullis
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help@r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide
> http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>

	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]

