Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Blahah 4108 days ago
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.
2 comments
baldfat 4108 days ago
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

link
Mikeb85 4108 days ago
> 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...

link
peatmoss 4108 days ago
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.

link
jackmaney 4108 days ago
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).
link
Mikeb85 4108 days ago
> 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).

link