Oh nuts! I replied all. I apologize for the noise!
Cheers,
Bert
Bert Gunter
"The trouble with having an open mind is that people keep coming along
and sticking things into it."
-- Opus (aka Berkeley Breathed in his "Bloom County" comic strip )
On Thu, Dec 29, 2016 at 6:40 AM, Bert Gunter <bgunter.4...@gmail.com> wrote:
> (Private -- as this is just my personal opinion and not really helpful).
>
> I found your comments informative. Thank you.
>
> My own experience with scientific colleagues -- biologists mostly --
> who use Excel in the way that you describe is that the "haptic" (great
> word!) ease with which they manipulate the data almost inevitably
> results in errors. That is, the *lack* of enforced structure in Excel
> allows them to do things that they shouldn't or don't mean to do,
> typically without raising any flags, typically causing downstream
> errors that can be hard to trace. Irreproducibility follows.
>
> My point is that the structure that you consider burdensome -- at
> least initially -- is desirable exactly because it forces them to
> think more carefully about what they are doing. Debugging, or worse
> yet, failure to realize that debugging is needed, takes far more time
> and is far more consequential.
>
> As I said, just my opinion, no reply necessary, and I do appreciate
> your thoughtful remarks.
>
> Best,
> Bert Gunter
>
> Bert Gunter
>
> "The trouble with having an open mind is that people keep coming along
> and sticking things into it."
> -- Opus (aka Berkeley Breathed in his "Bloom County" comic strip )
>
>
> On Thu, Dec 29, 2016 at 2:16 AM, Erich Subscriptions
> <erich.s...@neuwirth.priv.at> wrote:
>> Well, my few cents again.
>> the packages
>> openxslx and xlsx allow to write dataframes as Excel sheets.
>> (xlsx is Java based, so it has more requirements to run than openxlsx,
>> which is just C++ based)
>>
>> On Windows, R tools for Visual Studio allows Excel export.
>> For Windows, there also is our Excel add-in RExcel allowing
>> to use R from within Excel, and the R package rcom
>> which also allows to interact with Excel from R (more than just writing
>> Excel workbooks).
>> Our products (rcom and RExcel), however, are not unter a FOSS license.
>>
>> And a more general remark: There are a lot of things where R is a much
>> better choice than Excel,
>> but there are a few things where it really makes sense to use spreadsheets.
>>
>> Spreadsheets offer a totally different paradigm to work with data, or more
>> generally,
>> numbers and formulas.
>> One can interact with the data directly, not hide them behind variable names.
>> And, the interaction is haptic, gesture based, not expressed as a language.
>>
>> Rearranging the layout of a pivot table by dragging variable “blocks”
>> is very intuitive and something which R itself doe not offer
>> (in fact, I wrote an add-in for R Commander to implement it).
>>
>> Of course, Excel is not a good chice for a polished reproducible workflow.
>> But I think quite a few people (including me), when starting a new project,
>> are not ready immediately to set up this “perfect” workflow,
>> and it is much easier to experiment with the data with a spreadsheet based
>> interface.
>>
>> For me, working with spreadsheets is more like improvising some Jazz,
>> and writing R code is like writing a score for a composition.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>> On 29 Dec 2016, at 00:15, Rolf Turner <r.tur...@auckland.ac.nz> wrote:
>>>
>>> On 29/12/16 10:45, Bryan Mac wrote:
>>>> Hi,
>>>>
>>>> How do I export results from R to Excel in a format-friendly way? For
>>>> example, when I copy and paste my results into excel, the formatting
>>>> is messed up.
>>>
>>>
>>> Short answer: *Don't*. ("Friends don't let friends use excel for
>>> statistics.")
>>>
>>> Longer answer: Googling on "export R data to excel" yields lots of
>>> "useful" hits --- "useful" given the (false) assertion that it is useful to
>>> export things to excel.
>>>
>>> cheers,
>>>
>>> Rolf Turner
>>>
>>> --
>>> Technical Editor ANZJS
>>> Department of Statistics
>>> University of Auckland
>>> Phone: +64-9-373-7599 ext. 88276
>>>
>>> ______________________________________________
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>>> 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.
>>
>> ______________________________________________
>> R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see
>> 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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