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MS Excel Data

2 messages · diegol, Duncan Murdoch

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Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
Dear Professor,

I'd like to make a suggestion. 

When I first read some articles ands posts about R's wonderful capabilities,
the first thing I tried to do is import some data to which I had fitted
distributions in Excel, so I could compare the results with R. However,
after reading "R Data Import/Export" and some other references (including
the relevant parts of "Introduction to R"), I still found importing
excruciatingly difficult and frustrating, and I believe that to be true for
many people first approaching R. After a long while I did find the way
around it; however, some time later I came across the R Commander package
and GUI, which makes these simple tasks really simple.

My point is that such unexpected difficulties might deter beginners from
ever considering R again. I believe that including a reference to the R
Commander package in the "R Data Import/Export" document could be a step
forward in this respect. Once the user becomes more familiar with R, they
can spend some more time to learn programmed solutions to data importing.

Best regards.

-----
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Diego Mazzeo
Actuarial Science Student
Facultad de Ciencias Econ?micas
Universidad de Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires, Argentina
#
On 08/12/2007 1:15 PM, diegol wrote:
Why not write one?  The source to that manual is available at 
https://svn.r-project.org/R/trunk/doc/manual/R-data.texi (in texinfo 
format).  If  you don't know how to handle the format, don't worry:  for 
a small change, you can just treat it like plain text.

If you email me a suggested patch I'll see about updating the manual.

Duncan Murdoch