Well, there's always RExcel to get all your R stuff into something M$
Ruffice can understand. And they're even working on a Word link if I got it
right.

Cheers
Joris

On Fri, May 7, 2010 at 12:24 PM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan@gmail.com>wrote:

> chrishold@psyctc.org wrote:
>
>> I've changed the subject line a bit here as Max is asking such a
>> fundamental question.
>>
>> Max Kuhn sent the following  at 01/05/2010 19:22:
>>
>>
>>> Chris,
>>>
>>>
>>>
>> ...
>>
>>
>>
>>> Why is it R Core's job to fulfill your wants and desires? I have a
>>> hard time thinking that very busy people would spend extra time doing
>>> something that they may or may not have a direct need for. Write it
>>> yourself or get a group of people together to do it. That what we did
>>> with odfWeave (for better or worse). If the task is beyond what you
>>> feel you can do, fund it.
>>>
>>>
>>
>> Ouch.  OK. I'm hugely grateful for your work on odfWeave Max and sorry
>> that Open Office isn't a solution for me at the moment.  However, I
>> don't think I'm being unreasonable or selfish.
>>
>> 1) Certainbly it's not R core's job to fulfil my wants and desires and
>> they will have ways to discuss what would strengthen R for lots of us.
>> Clearly I can submit a wishlist item to the R bugzilla and I should but
>> that's very particulate: how can the team find out of wishes are common
>> or would help increase use of R?
>>
>> There are files of key R core team members' wish lists on the R site but
>> almost none relate in any way to output and some appear to be years old.
>> I've worked with R (about 14 years I think) and as I look particularly
>> at the recent release notes, I see a lot of work went into changing the
>> help system which is one sort of output from R and a huge amount of work
>> went into transitions in the object orientation (S3 to S4).  I think
>> that what I am suggesting is about a core issue of seeing
>> a set of object properties for numeric output as including insertion of
>> tabs, ideally as providing flexible presenting and viewing of all
>> matrices, data frames and lists, and, some day, cross linkage of
>> graphics into output.  Ideally, as with the capacity of R to export its
>> graphics in a number of formats, I'd love to see this capitalising on
>> the work you have done for ODF and others have done for TeX etc.
>>
>> These strike me as central object handling issues, not things that
>> should for ever be offloaded to the libraries/packages.
>>
>>
>
> I don't think that because something is important it needs to be in the
> part of R that R Core handles.  The things that need to be there are things
> that can't be anywhere else.  Things that can be elsewhere should be
> elsewhere, because the more that is in base R, the more time R Core spends
> on maintenance, and the less time on development of base R or on the other
> things we do (e.g. the things our employers pay us to do).
>
> We don't always follow this rule:  in some cases, things that could be
> elsewhere are in base R because an R Core member doesn't mind taking on the
> maintenance, and it is easier to put them in base R than to create a new
> package for them.  (Sweave is an example of this; there has been talk of
> moving it out of the base, but that hasn't happened yet.)
>
> But I don't think any members of R Core use any of those word processors
> called MS Word, and I don't see any need for core support for producing
> output for them.  R already produces structured objects with all the
> semantics of XML objects (though it doesn't use that format to store them);
> it is simply a matter of deciding what format you'd like things to be
> displayed in, and then figuring out how to produce something in that format
> in a way that MS Word will understand.  The first task is definitely
> something within the range of an R user.  Getting it into some version of
> .doc or .docx or whatever  is not at all easy, but it really has very little
> to do with R.  It would make more sense to ask Microsoft to handle that part
> than it makes to ask R Core to do it.
>
> Duncan Murdoch
>
>
> 2) Do it myself: I wish! I'm a terrible programmer and work 50-70 hoursa
> week in my main jobs (I'm so outspoken here at the moment partly
>
>  because I'm off work post-op.)  I'm quite a good psychotherapist and
>> capable of working in several different modes of psychotherapy and with
>> individuals, couples, groups and families and I'm a fairly competent
>> researcher and clinical director.  I wish I'd been born or learned to be
>> a better programmer as I wish I'd been more musical and able to dance
>> but I'm not.  I can contribute ideas, help debug things and hope to
>> contribute much more of this when I retire from the main jobs.  I have
>> no links with programmers at work nor in my university location so I
>> have no colleagues with whom I can form a team to do this.
>>
>> 3) Pay for it myself: I was pretty ignorant about ways of paying for
>> R things.  I can't see me persuading my NHS employer to pay as we're
>> contracting rapidly and don't officially use R.  If we had the
>> outputting I'm describing in the R core I think I might be able to get
>> us to stop paying some thousands of pounds a year for SPSS and might be
>> able to shift say 1k in gratitude to R though NHS purchasing rules don't
>> make that easy.  (That, I think, is one of the huge challenges to open
>> source s'ware, if someone can tell me about ways to get organisations
>> who have to justify their purchasing as we do manage to pay for open
>> source development, I'd like to hear and I'll try to make it happen.)
>>
>> Prompted by your Email I have found the R project membership form and
>> 'faxed it off with payment and will probably donate some more on top of
>> that 25 euros.  However, I would love a way to make a donation
>> that would encourage someone to do this bit of work but I'm currently
>> unlikely, personally, to have the money to pay for all that's needed.
>>
>> Hope this helps explain my position.  I'm genuinely keen to hear others'
>> views.  Very best to all,
>>
>> Chris
>>
>>
>>
>>
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-- 
Joris Meys
Statistical Consultant

Ghent University
Faculty of Bioscience Engineering
Department of Applied mathematics, biometrics and process control

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