8 messages · Rolf Turner, jim holtman, Greg Snow +2 more
(mydata<- as.factor(c("1","2","3", ">2", "5", ">2")))
str(mydata)
newdata<- as.character(mydata)
newdata[newdata==">2"]<- 0
newdata<- as.numeric(newdata)
str(newdata)
We really need to keep Excel (and other spreadsheets) out of peoples hands.
Amen, bro'!!!
cheers,
Rolf Turner
But there are some important reasons to use Excel. In my work there are a lot of people that I have to send the equivalent of a data.frame to who want to look at the data and possibly slice/dice the data differently and then send back to me updates. These folks do not know how to use R, but do have Microsoft Office installed on their computers and know how to use the different products. I have been very successful in conveying what I am doing for them by communicating via Excel spreadsheets. It is also an important medium in dealing with some international companies who provide data via Excel and expect responses back via Excel. When dealing with data in a tabular form, Excel does provide a way for a majority of the people I work with to understand the data. Yes, there are problems with some of the ways that people use Excel, and yes I have had to invest time in scrubbing some of the data that I get from them, but if I did not, then I would probably not have a job working for them. I use R exclusively for the analysis that I do, but find it convenient to use Excel to provide a communication mechanism to the majority of the non-R users that I have to deal with. It is a convenient "work-around" because I would never get them to invest the time to learn R. So in the real world these is a need to Excel and we are not going to cause it to go away; we have to learn how to live with it, and from my standpoint, it has definitely benefited me in being able to communicate with my users and continuing to provide them with results that they are happy with. They refer to letting me work my "magic" on the data; all they know is they see the result via Excel and in the background R is doing the heavy lifting that they do not have to know about.
On 01/03/12 04:43, John Kane wrote:
(mydata<- as.factor(c("1","2","3", ">2", "5", ">2")))
str(mydata)
newdata<- as.character(mydata)
newdata[newdata==">2"]<- 0
newdata<- as.numeric(newdata)
str(newdata)
We really need to keep Excel (and other spreadsheets) out of peoples
hands.
Amen, bro'!!! ? ?cheers, ? ? ? ?Rolf Turner
______________________________________________ R-help at r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
Jim Holtman Data Munger Guru What is the problem that you are trying to solve? Tell me what you want to do, not how you want to do it.
Try sending your clients a data set (data frame, table, etc) as an MS Access data table instead. They can still view the data as a table, but will have to go to much more effort to mess up the data, more likely they will do proper edits without messing anything up (mixing characters in with numbers, have more sexes than your biology teacher told you about, add extra lines at top or bottom that makes reading back into R more difficult, etc.) I have had a few clients that I talked into using MS Access from the start to enter their data, there was often a bit of resistance at first, but once they tried it and went through the process of designing the database up front they ended up thanking me and believed that the entire data entry process was easier and quicker than had the used excel as they originally planned. Access is still part of MS office, so they don't need to learn R or in any way break their chains from being prisoners of bill, but they will be more productive in more ways than just interfacing with you. Access (databases in general) force you to plan things out and do the correct thing from the start. It is possible to do the right thing in Excel, but Excel does not encourage (let alone force) you to do the right thing, but makes it easy to do the wrong thing.
But there are some important reasons to use Excel. ?In my work there are a lot of people that I have to send the equivalent of a data.frame to who want to look at the data and possibly slice/dice the data differently and then send back to me updates. ?These folks do not know how to use R, but do have Microsoft Office installed on their computers and know how to use the different products. I have been very successful in conveying what I am doing for them by communicating via Excel spreadsheets. ?It is also an important medium in dealing with some international companies who provide data via Excel and expect responses back via Excel. When dealing with data in a tabular form, Excel does provide a way for a majority of the people I work with to understand the data. ?Yes, there are problems with some of the ways that people use Excel, and yes I have had to invest time in scrubbing some of the data that I get from them, but if I did not, then I would probably not have a job working for them. ?I use R exclusively for the analysis that I do, but find it convenient to use Excel to provide a communication mechanism to the majority of the non-R users that I have to deal with. ?It is a convenient "work-around" because I would never get them to invest the time to learn R. So in the real world these is a need to Excel and we are not going to cause it to go away; we have to learn how to live with it, and from my standpoint, it has definitely benefited me in being able to communicate with my users and continuing to provide them with results that they are happy with. ?They refer to letting me work my "magic" on the data; all they know is they see the result via Excel and in the background R is doing the heavy lifting that they do not have to know about. On Wed, Feb 29, 2012 at 4:41 PM, Rolf Turner <rolf.turner at xtra.co.nz> wrote:
On 01/03/12 04:43, John Kane wrote:
(mydata<- as.factor(c("1","2","3", ">2", "5", ">2")))
str(mydata)
newdata<- as.character(mydata)
newdata[newdata==">2"]<- 0
newdata<- as.numeric(newdata)
str(newdata)
We really need to keep Excel (and other spreadsheets) out of peoples
hands.
Amen, bro'!!! ? ?cheers, ? ? ? ?Rolf Turner
______________________________________________ R-help at r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
-- Jim Holtman Data Munger Guru What is the problem that you are trying to solve? Tell me what you want to do, not how you want to do it.
______________________________________________ R-help at r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
Gregory (Greg) L. Snow Ph.D. 538280 at gmail.com
Unfortunately, a lot of people who use MS Office don't have or know how to use MS Access. Where I work now (as in the past) I have to tie someone to their chair, give them a few pokes with the cattle prod and then show them that a CSV file will load straight into Excel before I can convince them that they can use such a heretical data format. You don't want to know what I have to do to convince them that they can view my listings in HTML. Jim PS - Always give them a _copy_ of the CSV file.
Try sending your clients a data set (data frame, table, etc) as an MS Access data table instead. They can still view the data as a table, but will have to go to much more effort to mess up the data, more likely they will do proper edits without messing anything up (mixing characters in with numbers, have more sexes than your biology teacher told you about, add extra lines at top or bottom that makes reading back into R more difficult, etc.) I have had a few clients that I talked into using MS Access from the start to enter their data, there was often a bit of resistance at first, but once they tried it and went through the process of designing the database up front they ended up thanking me and believed that the entire data entry process was easier and quicker than had the used excel as they originally planned. Access is still part of MS office, so they don't need to learn R or in any way break their chains from being prisoners of bill, but they will be more productive in more ways than just interfacing with you. Access (databases in general) force you to plan things out and do the correct thing from the start. It is possible to do the right thing in Excel, but Excel does not encourage (let alone force) you to do the right thing, but makes it easy to do the wrong thing. On Thu, Mar 1, 2012 at 6:15 AM, jim holtman<jholtman at gmail.com> wrote:
But there are some important reasons to use Excel. In my work there are a lot of people that I have to send the equivalent of a data.frame to who want to look at the data and possibly slice/dice the data differently and then send back to me updates. These folks do not know how to use R, but do have Microsoft Office installed on their computers and know how to use the different products. I have been very successful in conveying what I am doing for them by communicating via Excel spreadsheets. It is also an important medium in dealing with some international companies who provide data via Excel and expect responses back via Excel. When dealing with data in a tabular form, Excel does provide a way for a majority of the people I work with to understand the data. Yes, there are problems with some of the ways that people use Excel, and yes I have had to invest time in scrubbing some of the data that I get from them, but if I did not, then I would probably not have a job working for them. I use R exclusively for the analysis that I do, but find it convenient to use Excel to provide a communication mechanism to the majority of the non-R users that I have to deal with. It is a convenient "work-around" because I would never get them to invest the time to learn R. So in the real world these is a need to Excel and we are not going to cause it to go away; we have to learn how to live with it, and from my standpoint, it has definitely benefited me in being able to communicate with my users and continuing to provide them with results that they are happy with. They refer to letting me work my "magic" on the data; all they know is they see the result via Excel and in the background R is doing the heavy lifting that they do not have to know about. On Wed, Feb 29, 2012 at 4:41 PM, Rolf Turner<rolf.turner at xtra.co.nz> wrote:
On 01/03/12 04:43, John Kane wrote:
(mydata<- as.factor(c("1","2","3", ">2", "5", ">2")))
str(mydata)
newdata<- as.character(mydata)
newdata[newdata==">2"]<- 0
newdata<- as.numeric(newdata)
str(newdata)
We really need to keep Excel (and other spreadsheets) out of peoples
hands.
Amen, bro'!!!
cheers,
Rolf Turner
<SNIP>
It is possible to do the right thing in Excel, but Excel does not encourage (let alone force) you to do the right thing, but makes it easy to do the wrong thing.
<SNIP>
Fortune!
cheers,
Rolf Turner
Unfortunately they only know how to use Excel and Word. They are not folks who use a computer every day. Many of them run factories or warehouses and asking them to use something like Access would not happen in my lifetime (I have retired twice already). I don't have any problems with them "messing" up the data that I send them; they are pretty good about making changes within the context of the spreadsheet. The other issue is that I working with people in twenty different locations spread across the US, so I might be able to one of them to use Access (there is one I know that uses it), but that leaves 19 other people I would not be able to communicate with. The other thing is, is that I use Excel myself to slice/dice data since there are things that are easier in Excel than R (believe it or not). There are a number of tools I keep in my toolkit, and R is probably the most important, but I have not thrown the rest of them away since they still serve a purpose. So if you can come up with a way to 20 diverse groups, who are not computer literate, to change over in a couple of days from Excel to Access let me know. BTW, I tried to use Access once and gave it up because it was not as intuitive as some other tools and did not give me any more capability than the ones I was using. So I know I would have a problem in convincing other to make the change just so they could communicate with me, while they still had to use Excel to most of their other interfaces. This is the real world where you have to learn how to adapt to your environment and make the best of it. So you just have to learn that Excel can be your friend (or at least not your enemy) and can serve a very useful purpose in getting your ideas across to other people.
Try sending your clients a data set (data frame, table, etc) as an MS Access data table instead. ?They can still view the data as a table, but will have to go to much more effort to mess up the data, more likely they will do proper edits without messing anything up (mixing characters in with numbers, have more sexes than your biology teacher told you about, add extra lines at top or bottom that makes reading back into R more difficult, etc.) I have had a few clients that I talked into using MS Access from the start to enter their data, there was often a bit of resistance at first, but once they tried it and went through the process of designing the database up front they ended up thanking me and believed that the entire data entry process was easier and quicker than had the used excel as they originally planned. Access is still part of MS office, so they don't need to learn R or in any way break their chains from being prisoners of bill, but they will be more productive in more ways than just interfacing with you. Access (databases in general) force you to plan things out and do the correct thing from the start. ?It is possible to do the right thing in Excel, but Excel does not encourage (let alone force) you to do the right thing, but makes it easy to do the wrong thing. On Thu, Mar 1, 2012 at 6:15 AM, jim holtman <jholtman at gmail.com> wrote:
But there are some important reasons to use Excel. ?In my work there are a lot of people that I have to send the equivalent of a data.frame to who want to look at the data and possibly slice/dice the data differently and then send back to me updates. ?These folks do not know how to use R, but do have Microsoft Office installed on their computers and know how to use the different products. I have been very successful in conveying what I am doing for them by communicating via Excel spreadsheets. ?It is also an important medium in dealing with some international companies who provide data via Excel and expect responses back via Excel. When dealing with data in a tabular form, Excel does provide a way for a majority of the people I work with to understand the data. ?Yes, there are problems with some of the ways that people use Excel, and yes I have had to invest time in scrubbing some of the data that I get from them, but if I did not, then I would probably not have a job working for them. ?I use R exclusively for the analysis that I do, but find it convenient to use Excel to provide a communication mechanism to the majority of the non-R users that I have to deal with. ?It is a convenient "work-around" because I would never get them to invest the time to learn R. So in the real world these is a need to Excel and we are not going to cause it to go away; we have to learn how to live with it, and from my standpoint, it has definitely benefited me in being able to communicate with my users and continuing to provide them with results that they are happy with. ?They refer to letting me work my "magic" on the data; all they know is they see the result via Excel and in the background R is doing the heavy lifting that they do not have to know about. On Wed, Feb 29, 2012 at 4:41 PM, Rolf Turner <rolf.turner at xtra.co.nz> wrote:
On 01/03/12 04:43, John Kane wrote:
(mydata<- as.factor(c("1","2","3", ">2", "5", ">2")))
str(mydata)
newdata<- as.character(mydata)
newdata[newdata==">2"]<- 0
newdata<- as.numeric(newdata)
str(newdata)
We really need to keep Excel (and other spreadsheets) out of peoples
hands.
Amen, bro'!!! ? ?cheers, ? ? ? ?Rolf Turner
______________________________________________ R-help at r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
-- Jim Holtman Data Munger Guru What is the problem that you are trying to solve? Tell me what you want to do, not how you want to do it.
______________________________________________ R-help at r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
-- Gregory (Greg) L. Snow Ph.D. 538280 at gmail.com
Jim Holtman Data Munger Guru What is the problem that you are trying to solve? Tell me what you want to do, not how you want to do it.
Sometimes we adapt to our environment, sometimes we adapt our environment to us. I like fortune(108). I actually was suggesting that you add a tool to your toolbox, not limit it. In my experience (and I don't expect everyone else's to match) data manipulation that seems easier in Excel than R is only easier until the client comes back and wants me to redo the whole analysis with one typo fixed. Then rerunning the script in R (or Perl or other tool) is a lot easier than trying to remember where all I clicked, dragged, selected, etc. I do use Excel for somethings (though I would be happy to find other tools for that if it were possible to expunge Excel from the earth) and Word (I actually like using R2wd to send tables and graphs to word that I can then give to clients who just want to be able to copy and paste them to something else), I just think that many of the tasks that many people use excel for would be better served with a better tool. If someone reading this decides to put some more thought into a project up front and actually design a database up front rather than letting it evolve into some monstrosity in Excel, and that decision saves them some later grief, then the world will be a little bit better place.
Unfortunately they only know how to use Excel and Word. ?They are not folks who use a computer every day. ?Many of them run factories or warehouses and asking them to use something like Access would not happen in my lifetime (I have retired twice already). I don't have any problems with them "messing" up the data that I send them; they are pretty good about making changes within the context of the spreadsheet. ?The other issue is that I working with people in twenty different locations spread across the US, so I might be able to one of them to use Access (there is one I know that uses it), but that leaves 19 other people I would not be able to communicate with. The other thing is, is that I use Excel myself to slice/dice data since there are things that are easier in Excel than R (believe it or not). ?There are a number of tools I keep in my toolkit, and R is probably the most important, but I have not thrown the rest of them away since they still serve a purpose. So if you can come up with a way to 20 diverse groups, who are not computer literate, to change over in a couple of days from Excel to Access let me know. ?BTW, I tried to use Access once and gave it up because it was not as intuitive as some other tools and did not give me any more capability than the ones I was using. ?So I know I would have a problem in convincing other to make the change just so they could communicate with me, while they still had to use Excel to most of their other interfaces. This is the real world where you have to learn how to adapt to your environment and make the best of it. ?So you just have to learn that Excel can be your friend (or at least not your enemy) and can serve a very useful purpose in getting your ideas across to other people. On Fri, Mar 2, 2012 at 6:41 PM, Greg Snow <538280 at gmail.com> wrote:
Try sending your clients a data set (data frame, table, etc) as an MS Access data table instead. ?They can still view the data as a table, but will have to go to much more effort to mess up the data, more likely they will do proper edits without messing anything up (mixing characters in with numbers, have more sexes than your biology teacher told you about, add extra lines at top or bottom that makes reading back into R more difficult, etc.) I have had a few clients that I talked into using MS Access from the start to enter their data, there was often a bit of resistance at first, but once they tried it and went through the process of designing the database up front they ended up thanking me and believed that the entire data entry process was easier and quicker than had the used excel as they originally planned. Access is still part of MS office, so they don't need to learn R or in any way break their chains from being prisoners of bill, but they will be more productive in more ways than just interfacing with you. Access (databases in general) force you to plan things out and do the correct thing from the start. ?It is possible to do the right thing in Excel, but Excel does not encourage (let alone force) you to do the right thing, but makes it easy to do the wrong thing. On Thu, Mar 1, 2012 at 6:15 AM, jim holtman <jholtman at gmail.com> wrote:
But there are some important reasons to use Excel. ?In my work there are a lot of people that I have to send the equivalent of a data.frame to who want to look at the data and possibly slice/dice the data differently and then send back to me updates. ?These folks do not know how to use R, but do have Microsoft Office installed on their computers and know how to use the different products. I have been very successful in conveying what I am doing for them by communicating via Excel spreadsheets. ?It is also an important medium in dealing with some international companies who provide data via Excel and expect responses back via Excel. When dealing with data in a tabular form, Excel does provide a way for a majority of the people I work with to understand the data. ?Yes, there are problems with some of the ways that people use Excel, and yes I have had to invest time in scrubbing some of the data that I get from them, but if I did not, then I would probably not have a job working for them. ?I use R exclusively for the analysis that I do, but find it convenient to use Excel to provide a communication mechanism to the majority of the non-R users that I have to deal with. ?It is a convenient "work-around" because I would never get them to invest the time to learn R. So in the real world these is a need to Excel and we are not going to cause it to go away; we have to learn how to live with it, and from my standpoint, it has definitely benefited me in being able to communicate with my users and continuing to provide them with results that they are happy with. ?They refer to letting me work my "magic" on the data; all they know is they see the result via Excel and in the background R is doing the heavy lifting that they do not have to know about. On Wed, Feb 29, 2012 at 4:41 PM, Rolf Turner <rolf.turner at xtra.co.nz> wrote:
On 01/03/12 04:43, John Kane wrote:
(mydata<- as.factor(c("1","2","3", ">2", "5", ">2")))
str(mydata)
newdata<- as.character(mydata)
newdata[newdata==">2"]<- 0
newdata<- as.numeric(newdata)
str(newdata)
We really need to keep Excel (and other spreadsheets) out of peoples
hands.
Amen, bro'!!! ? ?cheers, ? ? ? ?Rolf Turner
______________________________________________ R-help at r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
-- Jim Holtman Data Munger Guru What is the problem that you are trying to solve? Tell me what you want to do, not how you want to do it.
______________________________________________ R-help at r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
-- Gregory (Greg) L. Snow Ph.D. 538280 at gmail.com
-- Jim Holtman Data Munger Guru What is the problem that you are trying to solve? Tell me what you want to do, not how you want to do it.
-- Gregory (Greg) L. Snow Ph.D. 538280 at gmail.com
Seconded John Kane Kingston ON Canada
-----Original Message----- From: rolf.turner at xtra.co.nz Sent: Sat, 03 Mar 2012 13:46:42 +1300 To: 538280 at gmail.com Subject: Re: [R] Cleaning up messy Excel data On 03/03/12 12:41, Greg Snow wrote: <SNIP>
It is possible to do the right thing in Excel, but Excel does not encourage (let alone force) you to do the right thing, but makes it easy to do the wrong thing.
<SNIP>
Fortune!
cheers,
Rolf Turner
______________________________________________ R-help at r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
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