xlsReadWrite Pro and embedding objects and files in Excel worksheets

James W. MacDonald wrote:

Have you looked at RDCOMClient? I would imagine you could do what you 
want with this package.

http://www.omegahat.org/RDCOMClient/

Interesting point. But the dcom client would be windows-specific?
(those I mentioned - the perl mondules, openoffice, run on windows,
as well as unix boxes - not sure about gnumeric :-).

In fact there is a very perverse way of doing it - ActiveState provides
a PerlCom product for hooking up dcom with activestate perl. i.e. you 
can go via R -> RDComClient -> PerlCom -> ActiveState Perl -> 
SpreadSheet::* . Just so that it does not require Excel installed
or an MS Office license...

In that sense, probably technology based on bridging over odbc
is also acceptable?

HTL

Hin-Tak Leung wrote:

I don't know of any native xls read/write facility in R, either
in core or as add-ons (I could be wrong), but if you want some source 
code to scavenge on to build some R package out of it, there are two
perl modules, Spreadsheet::ParseExcel and Spreadsheet::WriteExcel
which are small enough to "read from front cover to back cover",
so to speak, might be useful for reference and steal code from.

The other open-source packages which can read/write excel files
are gnumeric and openoffice and probably too big to find one's way 
around the source code to steal there :-).

Good luck.

HTL

Mark W Kimpel wrote:

Hans-Peter and other R developers,

How are you? Have you made any progess with embedding Url's in Excel?

Well, I have been busy thinking of more things for you to do;)

My colleagues in the lab are not R literate, and some are barely 
computer literate, so I give them everything in Excel workbooks. I 
have gradually evolved a system such that these workbooks have 
become compendia of my data, output, and methods. That, in fact, is 
why I bought the Pro version of xlsReadWritePro. I have been saving 
graphics as PDF files, then inserting them as object in Excel sheets.

What I would like to be able to do is to embed objects (files) in 
sheets of a workbook directly from within R. I would also like to be 
able to save my current R workspace as an object embedded in a sheet 
so that in the future, if packages change, I could go back and 
recreate the analysis. I do not need to be able to manuipulate files 
that R has not created, like a PDF file from another user. I would, 
however, like to be able to save my graphics as PDF files inside a 
worksheet, even if it meant creating a  temp file or something.

Before people begin talking about how MySQL or some other database 
could handle all that archiving, let me say that that is not what my 
colleagues want. They want a nice Excel file that they can take home 
on there laptops. One thing I like about worksheets is that they 
themselves can contain many embedded files, so it keeps our virtual 
desks neater and less confusing.

Hans, if you could do this, it would be of tremendous benefit to me 
and hopefully a lot of people. R developers tend to think that all 
scientists are running Linux on 64-bit computers, but most 
biomedical researches still store date in Excel files. This won't 
solve everybody's needs, but it could be a start.

Well, let me know what you think. I am cc'ing R-devel to see if any 
of those guys have ideas as well.

Thanks,
Mark