[R] R reports

[Gavin Simpson]

On Fri, 2010-08-20 at 22:13 -0700, Donald Paul Winston wrote:
> People have been generating reports with a computer for many years. R is
> supposed to be an analytical engine. Report writing is fundamental to any
> kind of analysis tool. SAS has had several report procedures/functions since
> the very beginning(1960's?). SAS stands for Statistical Analysis System. Do
> you really expect users to have to piece together a half dozen or so bits of
> R code to create a report?
> 
> It's not like it's difficult to do! I see this new company called Revolution
> Analytics who thinks R is the next big thing. Good grief. Maybe they can
> rescue it from the ghettoized academic world.

Why do you equate the R Foundation with commercial entities such as SAS
and Revolution Analytics? The latter charge hundreds of dollars for
their R system (but that is probably cheap if you need the support) and
I dread to think what SAS charges. R is an opensource initiative. No-one
gets paid to develop it and the R Foundation don't charge you to use it
or change it or, in the case of Revolution Analytics, take it and build
an entire company around it. This is what opensource is for!

When I write a report for some consultancy I am involved with, I often
need to tailor the output to the particular client I am working for.
They have different needs and understanding. If there was a one-shot
report() I would probably end up editing it all the time just to produce
the things I and my clients want. I'd probably even end up spending as
much time changing things as I would if I just drew the plots and output
summary tables in the correct formats myself, and then embedded that
code in Sweave/LaTeX.

Sweave involves almost nothing more than an understanding of R code
(which if you are using R you probably have already), plus the extra
noweb notation to mark code chunks up:

<<....>>=

@

Hardly the height of geekdom!

Note you don't need to use LaTeX to use Sweave. You can also do the same
think in OpenOffice.org files, which works like MS Word so is likely to
be more familiar to you. That LaTeX is an option reflects the community
from which R originated; LaTeX is used by these people to write reports,
papers etc already.

Oh, and if it isn't that difficult to do, I expect we'll see your
contributed report() function in a report package on CRAN real soon now?
Then we can all benefit from your efforts...?

G
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