Happy New Year all!

I am looking for a good solution for keeping record of my experiments -
could you please help me?

My work is about analysing data... My current work-flow:

1. Everyday my bosses give me some small steps/tasks for analysing data -
which are parts of one bigger/whole project.
2. Everyday I send tens of emails to bosses/colleagues to report my
findings in each step.
3. Bosses/colleagues often respond to my findings in real-time and suggest
new experiments/steps and ask "what-if" questions.
4. I often have to manually copy and paste the results from R console and
put them into an Excel and decorate a bit and send out.
5. Every one week and 2 weeks, we need to present to more senior bosses
with more nice-looking presentations which is a summary of our findings in
those 1-2 weeks. It's this time that is most chaotic because my colleagues
and I have to dig into all the hundreds of emails in the past 1-2 weeks and
copy and paste and organize those data again and make a nice overall
summary for presentation...
6. As I am a hard-working guy, I myself often run my own random/ad-hoc
experiments using out-of-work time and whenever I have interesting
findings, I will send to immediate bosses and colleagues to seek their
comments.
7. All these experiments are in fact variations of different versions/ideas
of one big/whole project. Lets say in one big project bosses/colleagues and
I have come up with a few big ideas, then we have a few sub-projects:

MyProjectIdea1
MyProjectIdea2
...
MyProjectIdeaN

And each idea has a few variations, mostly are for answering "what-if"
questions by varying the parameters here and there ...
For example:

MyProjectIdea1_Variation1_WhatIfParam1ChangedTo1.2?
...
...
etc.

8. Most experiments run tens of minutes to many hours... and some of them
have to run on Linux, and some others can be run on Windows. Fortunately we
have universal paths accessible on both Windows and Linux, so those won't
be problem...

9. Because of the time-consuming nature of these experiments, I also save
the images as "rData" whenever I can. However, it's necessary to keep track
of the context where these data were generated. Otherwise even the records
of these images won't help recall the scenario we have run...

---------------------------------------------------

Keeping track of these changes and all kinds of "what-if"s now becomes
increasingly a problem for me.

Some times in order to respond to a query, although I have done it before
already, but because I didn't keep record and save the result, or even
though I have saved the memory image yet I am not completely sure about the
"cleanness" of the results/data,I have to redo it and wait for another few
hours.

Is there a way that I can manage these whole processes better and be more
productive?

I have been digging and thinking about this for while and I guess Sweave is
the right way to go?

The problem for Sweave is that it's hard to make Latex generated pdf
appealing to business managers... so if I keep records in Sweave/Latex for
my own record/benefit (that's already a big benefit)... I still need to
somehow manually copy/paste the data from Sweave/Latex/pdf into
Word/Excel/Powerpoint in order to make a nice presentation...

I know there are some Open Office and Word version of Sweave... the problem
is that I couldn't find many demonstrations on these topics and my question
is: are they good and can they fulfill what we needed?

Your thoughts are greatly appreciated!

Thanks a lot!

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