[R-gui] your favourite spreadsheet-like data viewer or editor?

[Liviu Andronic]

On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 10:17 AM, Erich Neuwirth
<erich.neuwirth at univie.ac.at> wrote:
> Regarding Peter's comment:
> One of the lesser known facilities in Excel is array formulas.
> Array formulas are formulas with results taking up a range, e.g. a column,
> and not only a cell. That way, you can do vector and matrix operations.
> Using this mechanism essentially allows you to do what you want, create one formula
> for a whole column, without the need to copy the formula.
> One of the problems many statisticians have with Excel that they do not know
> the more advanced features and judge the software based on their
> somewhat limited knowledge.
>
There are other reasons [1] why one may want to avoid doing statistics
in Excel, or even trusting it with one's data. My favourite one is the
properties of unary minus. In R,
> -3^2
[1] -9
> -(3)^2
[1] -9
> -(3^2)
[1] -9

Try the same expressions in OOo or Excel, and you may be surprised by
getting different results: sometimes positive and others negative.
There's even a fortune:
> fortune('unary')

Thomas Lumley: The precedence of ^ is higher than that of unary minus. It may
be surprising, [...]
Hervé Pagès: No, it's not surprising. At least to me... In the country where I
grew up, I've been teached that -x^2 means -(x^2) not (-x)^2.
   -- Thomas Lumley and Hervé Pagès (both explaining that operator precedence
      is working perfectly well)
      R-devel (January 2006)

Another turn-off is the potential loss of precision just from passing
your data through Excel.

Anyways, for more detailed discussion read Patrick's document.
Personally I'm hopping off this potentially flamy wagon. Regards
Liviu

[1] http://lib.stat.cmu.edu/S/Spoetry/Tutor/spreadsheet_addiction.html