Hi Mark, > I would like to be able to use a single Excel spreadsheet as an archive > for any output I generate in a single R session, including pdf files of > graphics and possibly the R history or even the R workspace itself.
What we do is: - assemble all generated files (xls/png/txt) in a specific *folder* - the pictures currently end in zip files - Excel currently only holds the data (no images etc.) - we don't save any workspace or .Rdata. Each calculation starts from scratch (sometimes with cached data, but this is transparent) - we have some packages with the most important/stable source code - other code we source each time before a calculation - all code is in a subversion repository and therefore has it's full history. This works very nice for us. It was not so easy, i.e. we needed some time to find a lean and flexible setup. R still feels difficult for me. > sure that it can be done with VB. I am unsure, however, exactly how you > are generating the Excel files. For my own edification, are you using VB > or something similar? I use Delphi (Object Pascal). The hardwork is done by a 3rd party library which I bought (Flexcel/tmssoftware.com). You can download the source of the free xlsReadWrite to see how it was done. (To compile you would have to buy the flexcel library which - unfortunately - is not open source and I am not allowed to distribute it.) > Also, to make this not so Windows specific, would these files be > compatible with openOffice or some other open-source spreadsheet program > that would be compatible with the other OS's that R users employ? That > might make it more broadly appealing. No, its pure Excel format. - IIRC there is a ODF Toolkit Project which could be used to generate the files (maybe odfSweave does this already?). The ODF Toolkit Project is certainly appealing, not least because of the license situation. > I would also be interested in feedback from other developers as to what > they think of my general idea. Is it worth pursuing? Would it be worthy > of a simple package? About (small) original data, methods, parameters and matrix output I agree. Not so sure about graphs. I prefere to keep things separated. You can do this already today by controlling Excel from R (see tipps from Gabor) or (in part) with xlsReadWritePro. -- Regards, Hans-Peter ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel