When I was still teaching undergraduate intro biz-stat (among that community it is always abbreviated), we needed to control the spreadsheet behaviour of TAs who entered marks into a spreadsheet. We came up with TellTable (the Sourceforge site is still around with refs at http://telltable-s.sourceforge.net/), which put openoffice calc on a server and made sure change recording was on and the menu to switch off change recording was removed. It is used over a web browser with a VNC client. Neil Smith wrote a Java application to view all the changes by who, what, when etc., and we discovered the infrastructure was quite nice for running any single user app in a shared mode with version control. However, with Google Docs, we realized we could try to make money or enjoy life, and so the project is now moribund. However, the ideas are there, and if anyone gets interested, I'll be happy to try to dig up materials, though I suspect that it would be easier to work with the ideas and more modern tools.
The key idea is that there is just ONE master file, and that there is some discipline over keeping that file OK. My opinion is that this concept could be exploited much more for lots of different situations, but it seems that cloud technology is being used to create lots of versions of files rather than consolidate and control such files. JN On 03/03/2012 06:00 AM, r-help-requ...@r-project.org wrote: > Message: 76 > Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2012 20:04:05 -0500 > From: jim holtman <jholt...@gmail.com> > To: Greg Snow <538...@gmail.com> > Cc: r-help <r-help@r-project.org> > Subject: Re: [R] Cleaning up messy Excel data > Message-ID: > <caaxdm-6vzxcli4mr0gukwge5eva0-gx03fruey9ej3cajy4...@mail.gmail.com> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 > > Unfortunately they only know how to use Excel and Word. They are not > folks who use a computer every day. Many of them run factories or > warehouses and asking them to use something like Access would not > happen in my lifetime (I have retired twice already). > > I don't have any problems with them "messing" up the data that I send > them; they are pretty good about making changes within the context of > the spreadsheet. The other issue is that I working with people in > twenty different locations spread across the US, so I might be able to > one of them to use Access (there is one I know that uses it), but that > leaves 19 other people I would not be able to communicate with. ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list 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.
