Re: Re: Feature request: Save Gnumeric spreadsheets in R file format

[andreas karlsson ltv se]

Hi,

R is surely a great pieces of software, however it has its limitations. One
limitation is the editing of a data set in R, which is quite cumbersome. It
is often much easier to do in a spreadsheet software, where one can easily
copy and paste cells. This has led some R experts to recommend using Excel
to edit the data and then export it to R. For example, Michael J. Crawley,
author of "The R Book" (2007; ISBN: 978-0-470-51024-7) writes this:

"My preference is to do all of my data preparation and data editing in
Excel itself (because that is what it is good at). Once checked and edited,
I save the data from Excel to a tab-delimited text file (*.txt) that can be
imported to R very simply using the function called read.table"

See p. 6,
http://media.wiley.com/product_data/excerpt/42/04705102/0470510242-2.pdf)

Well, since I prefer using open source software I rather use Gnumeric
instead of Excel. However, it would be easier and faster if Gnumeric could
save a worksheet as a an .RData file, then one does not have to do all
these exports and imports.

I you are not considering including an .RData export function in Gnumeric,
please consider including an option to export to the .R file format.

Another great open source software, gretl (http://gretl.sourceforge.net/),
has the possibility to import .gnumeric file format files and export to .R
file format. Of course one can import Gnumeric files to gretl and then
export them to .R format for use in R, but it would be a lot easier to
export to .R format from Gnumeric directly.

Since gretl is open source and is written in the C programming language I
suppose it would not be too hard to include the same functionality in
Gnumeric, maybe it is even possible to take some code from gretl and
incorporate it in the Gnumeric code?

It could even attract many R users to Gnumeric since it makes it easy to
integrate Gnumeric data handling with statistical data analysis in R. It
would at least be better then using Excel.

Best regards
Andreas Karlsson

acuster gmail com wrote 2007-04-25 19:39:28 :

> Hello,
>
> Both are great pieces of software; glad you are working with them.
> Saving to .RData doesn't make much sense in a complex environment. You
> are much better off getting familiar with using Gnumeric's text
> import/export to go to text files and using R's read.table() or similar
> functions to go into and out of R. The R functions keep getting easier
> and better; learn the process once, and it will last you a long time.
>
> cheers,
> adrian
>
> On Wed, 2007-04-25 at 19:02 +0200, andreas karlsson ltv se wrote:
> > Hi,
> > > I have just started using Gnumeric. I am also using R
> > (http://www.r-project.org/) and would like to be able to easily export
> > Gnumeric spreadsheets to R file format for using it in R.
> > > Could you please add the possibility to save a Gnumeric spreadsheet
in the
> > .RData file format used by R?
> > > Thanks for a great software!
> > > Best regards
> > Andreas Karlsson
> > > _______________________________________________
> > gnumeric-list mailing list
> > gnumeric-list gnome org
> > http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnumeric-list