[R-gui] your favourite spreadsheet-like data viewer or editor?

Hi,

Having watched this discussion for some time, I would think RExcel, 
through RExcelInstaller, is the definitive, as well as most reliable, 
answer to the question. Or do I miss the point?

Only to the extent that you believe that Excel provides the definitive and reliable approach to data handling. There are people who disagree with that, e.g. those who have accidentally gotten the student number included in the grade point average, overwritten a formula cell with a constant, etc. 

Notice that other systems with "spreadsheet-like" viewers/editors, quite deliberately do not include full spreadsheet functionality. E.g., rather than have users enter a formula cell and replicate it along a column, SAS JMP allows you to attach a "formula property" to a column, which (other advantages and disadvantages of that system untold) strikes me as a considerably more sane approach to data transformations. 

Also, of course, RExcel is Windows-only and requires that you have Excel installed.

Peter Dalgaard
Center for Statistics, Copenhagen Business School
Solbjerg Plads 3, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
Phone: (+45)38153501
Email: pd.mes at cbs.dk  Priv: PDalgd at gmail.com

Hi,

Having watched this discussion for some time, I would think RExcel, 
through RExcelInstaller, is the definitive, as well as most reliable, 
answer to the question. Or do I miss the point?

Yes; that's an overkill for this situation.
Frank

Regards,
Tom Aldenberg
RIVM
PO Box 1
Bilthoven NL-3720BA
Netherlands
T: +31 30 2743137
F: +31 30 2744401


Disclaimer RIVM 
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Frank E Harrell Jr Professor and Chairman      School of Medicine
                   Department of Biostatistics Vanderbilt University

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On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 10:17 AM, Erich Neuwirth

Regarding Peter's comment:
One of the lesser known facilities in Excel is array formulas.
Array formulas are formulas with results taking up a range, e.g. a column,
and not only a cell. That way, you can do vector and matrix operations.
Using this mechanism essentially allows you to do what you want, create one formula
for a whole column, without the need to copy the formula.
One of the problems many statisticians have with Excel that they do not know
the more advanced features and judge the software based on their
somewhat limited knowledge.

There are other reasons [1] why one may want to avoid doing statistics
in Excel, or even trusting it with one's data. My favourite one is the
properties of unary minus. In R,

-3^2

[1] -9

-(3)^2

[1] -9

-(3^2)

[1] -9

Try the same expressions in OOo or Excel, and you may be surprised by
getting different results: sometimes positive and others negative.
There's even a fortune:

fortune('unary')

Thomas Lumley: The precedence of ^ is higher than that of unary minus. It may
be surprising, [...]
Herv? Pag?s: No, it's not surprising. At least to me... In the country where I
grew up, I've been teached that -x^2 means -(x^2) not (-x)^2.
   -- Thomas Lumley and Herv? Pag?s (both explaining that operator precedence
      is working perfectly well)
      R-devel (January 2006)

Another turn-off is the potential loss of precision just from passing
your data through Excel.

Anyways, for more detailed discussion read Patrick's document.
Personally I'm hopping off this potentially flamy wagon. Regards
Liviu

[1] http://lib.stat.cmu.edu/S/Spoetry/Tutor/spreadsheet_addiction.html

I have to answer again, and again partially because of a misleading
argument.

Let me state first that I think it is a matter of taste what kind of
software one wants to use in research. If a researcher dislikes Excel,
of course he can refuse to use it.
The situation is slightly different for academic teachers.
Not talking about spreadsheets and some of the statistics
they can do when Excel is installed on practically every
desktop in professional environments is dangerous
because you are implicitly telling your students
"we are so smart that we only are going to use software
which is not accessible to dumber people".

Not for your arguments (and I know Patrick's paper
and I disagree with quite a few - but not all - of his points).

-22 is indeed surprising, and people should be warned about it.
But by itself it is not a reason to refuse to use it.
If let Java compute 1234567788*2 you get -1825831720
No error message, no warning!
I think this is much worse, and still we have
rJava and many more R extensions based on Java.

You also mention the possible loss of precision when you pass data
through Excel. This is true if you use a character based transfer
(e.g. csv-files). One of the reasons Thomas and I developed
statconn and RExcel is that we wanted a transfer facility
retaining precision.

In fact, RExcel was written to overcome quite of the few shortcomings
Patrick mentions in his paper.

For academic teachers, I still think it is important to
know the shortcomings of Excel and also know which ones
can be alleviated by using RExcel.