I am pleasantly surprised with the development of a GUI for R.
However, I believe that the biggest target audience is centered around the various Office packages. Therefore, I am convinced that an integration into a spreadsheet program would be a welcomed and strategic step.
I, and the various contributors to that wiki page, lack however the programming skills to implement this. I would therefore welcome any help in getting this job started.
The OpenOffice developers begun with OOo 2.04 to extend the plugin architecture of OOo. It seems therefore not necessary anymore to code this directly into OOo core, but I believe it would be possible to take an alternative - and much more flexible - approach and implement it as an external component/plugin. Let me encourage you to take this idea into consideration.
I would be very grateful for any further ideas and suggestions. The statistical wiki page needs also a major revision and if there are any critical comments, I would welcome them, too.
Kind regards,
Leonard Mada
[aka discoleo]
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I do not have much time to consider this in detail right now, so I'll only be pointing out a few things (hope I'm not sounding too negative in this short form):
1) The RKWard description mentions "integration with office suites". This has not really been addressed in any way so far. However, what I have in mind with that personally is a) good ways to get data into RKWard, b) a nice way to get the output into office suites, preferentially in a way that they remain editable (right now, we simply output HTML).
2) I can't quite picture, how exactly R is to be integrated into the spreadsheet in your concept. Sure, you could simply add R syntax into the cells. That might well be helpful, but is far from a real GUI for R. What do you have in mind?
3) Did you look at RGnumeric, yet? Sure, it's the "wrong" office suite, and it seems to be abandoned. However, it seems this project might be much closer to what (I think) you have in mind than RKWard.
5) RKWard code is under GPL, and depends on Qt (which pretty much forces the licence).
6) I think the first objective of your project would be to write an R package allowing to get and set data from an OOo spreadsheet (probably using RObjectTables, and CORBA/D-Bus). This would be immediately useful in many different scenarios, not just 2. Unfortunately, I don't think RKWard has much code that could be reused for this purpose.
Maybe, it's easiest to take further discussion directly to the mailing-list (rkward-devel@lists.sourceforge.net).
Regards
Thomas
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
Hello to all project developers,
I am pleasantly surprised with the development of a GUI for R.
However, I believe that the biggest target audience is centered around the various Office packages. Therefore, I am convinced that an integration into a spreadsheet program would be a welcomed and strategic step.
I have begun lobbying this idea on the OpenOffice forums (see http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=66589\) and also started to expand and develop the statistical wiki page (see http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Statistical_Data_Analysis_Tool\), focusing havily on R integration.
I, and the various contributors to that wiki page, lack however the programming skills to implement this. I would therefore welcome any help in getting this job started.
The OpenOffice developers begun with OOo 2.04 to extend the plugin architecture of OOo. It seems therefore not necessary anymore to code this directly into OOo core, but I believe it would be possible to take an alternative - and much more flexible - approach and implement it as an external component/plugin. Let me encourage you to take this idea into consideration.
I would be very grateful for any further ideas and suggestions. The statistical wiki page needs also a major revision and if there are any critical comments, I would welcome them, too.
Kind regards,
Leonard Mada
[aka discoleo]
Hi Leonard,
I do not have much time to consider this in detail right now, so I'll only be pointing out a few things (hope I'm not sounding too negative in this short form):
1) The RKWard description mentions "integration with office suites". This has not really been addressed in any way so far. However, what I have in mind with that personally is a) good ways to get data into RKWard, b) a nice way to get the output into office suites, preferentially in a way that they remain editable (right now, we simply output HTML).
2) I can't quite picture, how exactly R is to be integrated into the spreadsheet in your concept. Sure, you could simply add R syntax into the cells. That might well be helpful, but is far from a real GUI for R. What do you have in mind?
3) Did you look at RGnumeric, yet? Sure, it's the "wrong" office suite, and it seems to be abandoned. However, it seems this project might be much closer to what (I think) you have in mind than RKWard.
4) http://www.omegahat.org/RObjectTables/ may be a valueable concept in bridging the data to R and back (maybe RGnumeric even uses this, I don't know).
5) RKWard code is under GPL, and depends on Qt (which pretty much forces the licence).
6) I think the first objective of your project would be to write an R package allowing to get and set data from an OOo spreadsheet (probably using RObjectTables, and CORBA/D-Bus). This would be immediately useful in many different scenarios, not just 2. Unfortunately, I don't think RKWard has much code that could be reused for this purpose.
Maybe, it's easiest to take further discussion directly to the mailing-list (rkward-devel@lists.sourceforge.net).
Regards
Thomas