Message-ID: <457103B1.7010308@stats.uwo.ca>
Date: 2006-12-02T04:40:17Z
From: Duncan Murdoch
Subject: Is there a better way for inputing data manually?
In-Reply-To: <365031447.30585@eyou.net>
On 12/1/2006 11:00 PM, Wei-Wei Guo wrote:
> Dear All,
>
> I have worked with R for some time. It's a great tool for data analysis. But it's too hard to inputing raw data manually with R (I don't mean importing data. R is good at importing data). Maybe it's not a focused topic in this list, but I don't know other place where I can ask the question. How do you do when inputing data from a paper material, such as questionnaire, or what do you use ?
I would not use R for this. Depending on how many questionnaires I had,
from small number to large, I would use:
1. A text file.
2. A spreadsheet, like Excel, or the OpenOffice one, or the R data editor.
3. A custom program written specifically to handle the particular
questionnaire.
You can do 1 and 2 in R, but you can't do them as well as programs
dedicated to those tasks, and you can't do 3 at all well. It depends a
lot on the specific conventions of the platform you're working on. R is
aimed at writing cross-platform programs, and isn't particularly good at
writing GUI programs, which is what you want here. I would personally
use Delphi for this, but there are lots of alternatives.
Duncan Murdoch