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by jebus989 4104 days ago
Making R available from Excel seems a good idea to ease the transition for newbies (like R commander) but what advantages does the standalone IDE have over RStudio or the default R.app?

Edit: actually I managed to click through to find this screenshot: http://fasterstat.com/Images/Desktop/12_R_gui.png which looks novel (can't currently watch the video unfortunately)

2 comments

A major use-case for Excel integration is in finance, where a vast number of analysts - not newbies in any meaningful sense - work in Excel. Giving them access to the power of R from within a familiar environment is a great thing.

Recommendation for the developer (if you're not doing this already): market hard to finance businesses. You'll make a killing.

Term newbies in R was what the poster before stated.

Personally I would NOT want to have anyone use R with a spreadsheet program.

1) I want manipulated data that is clear to replicate

2) I want my output to be plots and reports not another spreadsheet

> 2) I want my output to be plots and reports not another spreadsheet

Knitr for the win! Seriously great package (and integrated nicely into R Studio), I use it for all my reports, presentations, etc...

I'm finding myself loving org-babel more and more. I also love knitr, but in comparison org-babel:

- Works with just about any language you can imagine, not just R or the few other hypothetically supported languages

- Allows me to write in a lightweight Markdown-comparable, LaTeX-augmentable syntax, except org-mode supports internal references.

- Lets you do truly obscene things like pass values from bash, to python, to julia, to R

As Emacs begins to move more and more to Guile, I hope that the org-* functionality can be instrumented as embeddable libraries. I understand that Emacs isn't for everyone, and thus I wish org-mode (the format) and org-babel were available to the rest of the world. I was surprised to find how few edge-cases aren't better handled by org-* than knitr / RMarkdown.

Agreed. 99% of the time, I only use Excel as a CSV viewer (and it's a rather clunky and error-prone CSV viewer at that).
> A major use-case for Excel integration is in finance, where a vast number of analysts - not newbies in any meaningful sense - work in Excel.

R and Excel integration already exists: http://www.r-bloggers.com/a-million-ways-to-connect-r-and-ex...

Not that I think it's a good idea. Also, R is already a thing in Finance, quite a few job postings list it as a useful skill, and Linkedin has R/Finance groups.

Anyhow, it's much easier to manipulate data with scripts than spreadsheets, especially with R packages like quantmod. Looking at giant spreadsheets makes my eyes bleed and my head hurt, plus I think R Studio makes more sense for newbies to R anyway (and R Studio Server is fantastic for businesses).

graphical user interface for selected packages/functions, support for multiple monitors,...
Both sound good, maybe you could highlight these on your landing page? The picker for RColorBrewer palettes looks particularly handy!
Yes you're right. It's the plane.
Typos on page: univerties

FasteR - desctop application

This tools hepls

or as [an] application

There are several other typos which, whilst trivial, are quite jarring:

http://fasterstat.com/Product produsing -> producing poverfull -> powerful

http://fasterstat.com/ anoher -> another

There is also inconsistent use of 'Addin' and 'Add-In'.

The video presents version 1.4.1 (last 10 seconds of the video), the website only lists version 0.4.1. I assume you changed the version number after finishing the video?

It was hard/impossible for me to read the R code in the video while playing it at 1080p.