Re: strings in gnumeric / awk / etc.

[Prof J C Nash <nashjc uottawa ca>]

Some of the issues being raised suggest that a spreadsheet is not the 
right analytic tool. How about a data frame in R? There are easy 
transformations from spreadsheet to data-frame and back (and they should 
be better set up but are not to my knowledge!). R allows character 
strings to be converted to factors which can be very useful in some 
analyses e.g., regressions. There are quite a few character handling 
functions, and some support for regexes, though I will not claim any 
expertise in using the latter.

My own opinion, as a supporter of gnumeric, is that we sometimes try too 
hard to do everything in the spreadsheet.

JN