From sdavis2 at mail.nih.gov  Wed Mar 28 12:48:53 2007
From: sdavis2 at mail.nih.gov (Sean Davis)
Date: Wed, 28 Mar 2007 06:48:53 -0400
Subject: [Rd] Bridging R to OpenOffice
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0703281210390.31714-100000@reclus.nhh.no>
References: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0703281210390.31714-100000@reclus.nhh.no>
Message-ID: <200703280648.54111.sdavis2@mail.nih.gov>

On Wednesday 28 March 2007 06:25, Roger Bivand wrote:
> On Wed, 28 Mar 2007, Hin-Tak Leung wrote:
> > Hmm, if all you are interested is reading/writing Excel spreadsheets
> > from R, there are much lighter and easier ways of doing it, than
> > hooking up with openoffice. The Perl people have had
> > Spreadsheet::ParseExcel and Spreadsheet::WriteExcel for years (and
> > they work quite well, personal experience). Those are tiny
> > (a couple of Mb's?) compared to the size of openoffice.
>
> I don't think this is the problem here - the proposal says: "Create an
> add-on component that allows a Calc user to let the R environment do
> calculations on data from Calc cells and put the results into the
> spreadsheet again". It feels much more like embedding R in the OO
> spreadsheet and/or elsewhere, which would be similar to using DCOM in
> Excel. There would also be questions about how tightly integrated an
> embedded R should be, how functionality would be provided and documented,
> and how such a setup ought to be administered and maintained.
>
> As RExcel, the structure depends crucially on having joint expertise in
> place to write and maintain the R script glue (dialogues) to provide the
> functionality being added to Calc. Typically, this would be something an
> organisation of some size might need, but it would be unlikely to be a GUI
> for novice R users unwilling to scale the learning curve (a steep learning
> curve, of course, means learn a lot in a short time, hence a good thing!).

There are examples of doing this with Excel, which have been quite successful.  
Here is at least one example (which I post for potential contact 
information):

http://linus.nci.nih.gov/BRB-ArrayTools.html

Sean



[Rd] Bridging R to OpenOffice
Sean Davis