[R] Form using R

[Farrel Buchinsky]

Tal Galili <tal.galili <at> gmail.com> writes:

> 
> Hi Nilza,
> I just wrote a more detailed answer to your question in the following post:
> Google spreadsheets + google forms + R = Easily collecting and importing
> data for analysis<http://www.r-statistics.com/2010/03/google-spreadsheets-
google-forms-r-easily-collecting-and-importing-data-for-analysis/>

on Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 4:49 PM, Nilza BARROS <nilzabarros <at> gmail.com> 
wrote:
> 
> > Hi, R users
> >
> > We can create a form using R?
> > I would like to create a form where the information can be read by R.
> > Itneeds to be updated daily because I have to tabulate the reasons for
> > delays
> > in the generation of numerical models products.


There is also a package called RGoogleData that can import data from Google 
Spreadsheets (even when they are not public). It has one benefit over 
RGoogleDocs; RGoogleData can download a spreadsheet as a csv file to your 
harddrive. You can then read the csv file into R - read.csv(). Those steps can 
easily be written into a script so that you do not have to manually futz with 
them each time. The benefit of the csv download is that it is very fast. Both 
the RGoogleDocs and the RGoogleData are slow in reading the spreadsheet into R. 
I understand, but may be wrong, that Google Stores all the data as HTML and its 
API spits it out as xml which these r packages then need to parse out line by 
line. The csv treatment by comparison is instantaneous. 

Only one big problem. As of a few months ago, RGoogleData has stopped working 
for me. I think it is still working for its writer, Adrian Dragulescu. Adrian 
has been very generous with his time in trying to help me. He predicts that he 
will go back to exploring his package once Google updates their API.

Try it out. I would love to hear what happens.

http://r-forge.r-project.org/projects/rgoogledata/