On Sun, Nov 22, 2009 at 11:15 PM, David Winsemius <dwinsemius@comcast.net>wrote:

>
> On Nov 22, 2009, at 4:45 PM, stephen's mailinglist account wrote:
>
> On Sun, Nov 22, 2009 at 11:14 AM, frenchcr <frenchcr@btinternet.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>
>>>
>>> Please help me persuade IT to install R on my computer!
>>>
>>> All suggestions welcome.
>>>
>>> Our IT department run scared when you mention software that they have no
>>> working experience of.
>>>
>>> I need to know the pros and cons of having R on corporate desktops.
>>>
>>> Please no funny stuff, this is quite a serious issue for us.
>>>
>>> Pros and cons would be good.
>>>
>>> Thanks.
>>> --
>>> View this message in context:
>>>
>>> http://old.nabble.com/how-do-i-persuade-IT-to-install-R-on-PCs----...and-should-I----tp26464163p26464163.html
>>> Sent from the R help mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>>>
>>> ______________________________________________
>>> 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<http://www.r-project.org/posting-guide.html>
>>> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>>>
>>>
>> I requested to have R installed at work.
>> For me it helped that I have a lot of non-standard technical packages
>> anyway
>> that are off radar for support from the IT department anyway - they only
>> support for original install rights anyway.
>> They wanted to know what the licence was - GPL is recognised and they
>> don't
>> run a mile.
>> I did my homework and found some other people on a company research site
>> were already using R so I could use that as justification.
>> I had some code ready to run that could produce graphs easily that are
>> very
>> hard to do in Excel and require a lot of custom code (and even then aren't
>> good).
>> We do use some other stats packages anyway and are being encouraged to use
>> proper packages rather than kludging through in Excel
>> References like this (below) have been circulated at work which adds
>> weight
>> to arguments that we should not just accept the 'standard' Office install.
>> Although I did not use this in my justification.
>>
>> @ARTICLE{,
>>  author = {B.D. McCullough and David A. Heiser},
>>
>
> I'm not surprised to see McCollough and Heiser's names on such an article.
> They have both a long track record of pointing out Excel's statistical
> deficiencies. (I don't they did so together in the past.)  MS has turned a
> deaf ear to their efforts to point the way to correct methods. It is truly
> amazing that MS continues to ignore constrictive criticism and that such
> arrogance is compounded by corporate policies encouraging reliance on
> demonstrably faulty tools. The full list of articles documenting MS's
> resistance to statistical corrections would be much longer that just this
> one article and extends back more than a decade.
>
>
>  title = {On the accuracy of statistical procedures in Microsoft Excel
>> 2007},
>>  journal = {Computational Statistics \& Data Analysis},
>>  year = {2008},
>>  volume = {52},
>>  pages = {4570--4578},
>>  number = {10}
>> }
>>
>> ( http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.csda.2008.03.004)
>> I use R via TINN-R (http://www.sciviews.org/Tinn-R/) on a Windows
>> desktop.
>>
>> Stephen
>>
>
> --
>
> David Winsemius, MD
> Heritage Laboratories
> West Hartford, CT
>
>

Further similar articles can be found at
http://www.practicalstats.com/xlsstats/excelstats.html and in the same issue
of Computional Statistics and data analysis

regards
Stephen

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