From hin-tak.leung at cimr.cam.ac.uk  Wed Mar 28 11:57:11 2007
From: hin-tak.leung at cimr.cam.ac.uk (Hin-Tak Leung)
Date: Wed, 28 Mar 2007 10:57:11 +0100
Subject: [Rd] Bridging R to OpenOffice
In-Reply-To: <4609655A.5070209@gmx.net>
References: <4609655A.5070209@gmx.net>
Message-ID: <460A3BF7.8010605@cimr.cam.ac.uk>

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.

HTL

Leonard Mada wrote:
> Dear members of the R Development Team,
> 
> I am looking for people with a deep understanding of R internals to 
> assist in bridging R to OpenOffice.
> 
> While R is a state of the art statistical environment, less experienced 
> users often find it difficult to work with R. Therefore, I believe that 
> a bridge between R and a spreadsheet program will make this transition 
> less painful. I sincerely believe that this will benefit both the R 
> community as well as the potential new users.
> 
> OpenOffice is an open-source office suite that includes a spreadsheet 
> program (Calc).
> 
> OpenOffice.org (OOo) is participating in the Google Summer of Code 2007 
> initiative sponsored by Google and one of the proposed projects involves 
> the creation of an add-on component that allows an OOo Calc user to let 
> the R environment do calculations on data from Calc cells and put the 
> results into the spreadsheet again. A brief description can be found on 
> the OOo Summer of Code wiki page 
> (http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Summer_of_Code_2007).
> 
> Two students have already shown interest in this project (see the OOo 
> mailing list, 
> http://sc.openoffice.org/servlets/BrowseList?listName=dev&from=2007-03-01&to=2007-03-31&by=date&first=21&selectedPage=2, 
> the "Summer of Code: R and Calc" thread).
> 
> While mentoring is already available from a member of the OpenOffice 
> team (I will try to offer a helping hand on statistics and R-syntax, but 
> NOT the coding part itself), I feel that we still need someone with 
> R-core expertise. I am aware of various existing packages (rcom, RDCOM) 
> and the availability of various online-informations (like 
> http://developer.r-project.org/embedded.html), however more specific 
> questions may arise in the future, especially as this embedding should 
> be platform-independent, and I would welcome any help from the R-core 
> team members.
> 
> I am looking forward to hear from you and hope that this project will be 
> a great success. I would like to thank you in advance for your effort.
> 
> Sincerely,
> 
> Leonard Mada
> 
> ______________________________________________
> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel



[Rd] Bridging R to OpenOffice
Hin-Tak Leung