On Fri, 2010-08-20 at 22:13 -0700, Donald Paul Winston wrote: > People have been generating reports with a computer for many years. R is > supposed to be an analytical engine. Report writing is fundamental to any > kind of analysis tool. SAS has had several report procedures/functions since > the very beginning(1960's?). SAS stands for Statistical Analysis System. Do > you really expect users to have to piece together a half dozen or so bits of > R code to create a report? > > It's not like it's difficult to do! I see this new company called Revolution > Analytics who thinks R is the next big thing. Good grief. Maybe they can > rescue it from the ghettoized academic world.
Why do you equate the R Foundation with commercial entities such as SAS and Revolution Analytics? The latter charge hundreds of dollars for their R system (but that is probably cheap if you need the support) and I dread to think what SAS charges. R is an opensource initiative. No-one gets paid to develop it and the R Foundation don't charge you to use it or change it or, in the case of Revolution Analytics, take it and build an entire company around it. This is what opensource is for! When I write a report for some consultancy I am involved with, I often need to tailor the output to the particular client I am working for. They have different needs and understanding. If there was a one-shot report() I would probably end up editing it all the time just to produce the things I and my clients want. I'd probably even end up spending as much time changing things as I would if I just drew the plots and output summary tables in the correct formats myself, and then embedded that code in Sweave/LaTeX. Sweave involves almost nothing more than an understanding of R code (which if you are using R you probably have already), plus the extra noweb notation to mark code chunks up: <<....>>= @ Hardly the height of geekdom! Note you don't need to use LaTeX to use Sweave. You can also do the same think in OpenOffice.org files, which works like MS Word so is likely to be more familiar to you. That LaTeX is an option reflects the community from which R originated; LaTeX is used by these people to write reports, papers etc already. Oh, and if it isn't that difficult to do, I expect we'll see your contributed report() function in a report package on CRAN real soon now? Then we can all benefit from your efforts...? G -- %~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~% Dr. Gavin Simpson [t] +44 (0)20 7679 0522 ECRC, UCL Geography, [f] +44 (0)20 7679 0565 Pearson Building, [e] gavin.simpsonATNOSPAMucl.ac.uk Gower Street, London [w] http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~ucfagls/ UK. WC1E 6BT. [w] http://www.freshwaters.org.uk %~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~% ______________________________________________ R-help@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.
