[FORGED] Export R output in Excel

(Private -- as this is just my personal opinion and not really helpful).

I found your comments informative. Thank you.

My own experience with scientific colleagues -- biologists mostly --
who use Excel in the way that you describe is that the "haptic" (great
word!) ease with which they manipulate the data almost inevitably
results in errors. That is, the *lack* of enforced structure in Excel
allows them to do things that they shouldn't or don't mean to do,
typically without raising any flags, typically causing downstream
errors that can be hard to trace. Irreproducibility follows.

My point is that the structure that you consider burdensome -- at
least initially -- is desirable exactly because it forces them to
think more carefully about what they are doing. Debugging, or worse
yet, failure to realize that debugging is needed, takes far more time
and is far more consequential.

As I said, just my opinion, no reply necessary, and I do appreciate
your thoughtful remarks.

Best,
Bert Gunter

Bert Gunter

"The trouble with having an open mind is that people keep coming along
and sticking things into it."
-- Opus (aka Berkeley Breathed in his "Bloom County" comic strip )


On Thu, Dec 29, 2016 at 2:16 AM, Erich Subscriptions
<erich.subs at neuwirth.priv.at> wrote:

Well, my few cents again.
the packages
openxslx and xlsx allow to write dataframes as Excel sheets.
(xlsx is Java based, so it has more requirements to run than openxlsx,
which is just C++ based)

On Windows, R tools for Visual Studio allows Excel export.
For Windows, there also is our Excel add-in RExcel allowing
to use R from within Excel, and the R package rcom
which also allows to interact with Excel from R (more than just writing Excel workbooks).
Our products (rcom and RExcel), however, are not unter a FOSS license.

And a more general remark: There are a lot of things where R is a much better choice than Excel,
but there are a few things where it really makes sense  to use spreadsheets.

Spreadsheets offer a totally different paradigm to work with data, or more generally,
numbers and formulas.
One can interact with the data directly, not hide them behind variable names.
And, the interaction is haptic, gesture based, not expressed as a language.

Rearranging the layout of a pivot table by dragging variable ?blocks?
is very intuitive and something which R itself doe not offer
(in fact, I wrote an add-in for R Commander to implement it).

Of course, Excel is not a good chice for a polished reproducible workflow.
But I think quite a few people (including me), when starting a new project,
are not ready immediately to set up this ?perfect? workflow,
and it is much easier to experiment with the data with a spreadsheet based
interface.

For me, working with spreadsheets is more like improvising some Jazz,
and writing R code is like writing a score for a composition.

On 29 Dec 2016, at 00:15, Rolf Turner <r.turner at auckland.ac.nz> wrote:

On 29/12/16 10:45, Bryan Mac wrote:

Hi,

How do I export results from R to Excel in a format-friendly way? For
example, when I copy and paste my results into excel, the formatting
is messed up.

Short answer:  *Don't*.  ("Friends don't let friends use excel for statistics.")

Longer answer:  Googling on "export R data to excel" yields lots of "useful" hits --- "useful" given the (false) assertion that it is useful to export things to excel.

cheers,

Rolf Turner

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Technical Editor ANZJS
Department of Statistics
University of Auckland
Phone: +64-9-373-7599 ext. 88276