From sz at sun.com  Wed Mar 28 15:20:09 2007
From: sz at sun.com (Stefan Zimmermann)
Date: Wed, 28 Mar 2007 15:20:09 +0200
Subject: [Rd] Bridging R to OpenOffice
In-Reply-To: <200703280648.54111.sdavis2@mail.nih.gov>
References: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0703281210390.31714-100000@reclus.nhh.no>
	<200703280648.54111.sdavis2@mail.nih.gov>
Message-ID: <460A6B89.8030903@sun.com>

Still didn't get the point, or missed the topic ?
It's OpenOffice.org and R not Excel and R, two totally different 
products at least from a philosophical standpoint. Not everybody is 
willing to pay license fee for Excel to be able to use R via a GUI.
That's how the idea was born to integrate or bridge R with 
OpenOffice.org Calc
Access statistical data analysis functionality computed by the almighty 
R engine from menues in Calc, and getting the results back in Calc (more 
for users than for developers). A plugin could do the job.
There is no point in saying "there is something in Excel" like there is 
none in saying "Why not using "S" ?
You may want to follow the link, offered by Leonard, to the "Google 
Summer of Code"-project which is menthored by Sun Microsystems 
(Star/OpenOffice developers), to get a clearer picture about it.
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Summer_of_Code_2007#Integration_of_R_into_Calc

best regards
Stefan


Sean Davis said the following on 28.03.2007 12:48:
> 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
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>
>   

-- 
"Just because the message may never be received does not mean it is not 
worth sending." 
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[Rd] Bridging R to OpenOffice
Stefan Zimmermann