I won't burden the list with copies of earlier posts -- all of us have experienced the frustration of dealing with folk who want to make their life easier by making ours difficult. However, I have noted that a few folk are starting to change attitudes. I was hired to give a training session last June to a fairly large unit in the Canadian government that realized a mix of Excel and SAS and SPSS and ... were leading to an unmaintainable mess of small applications needed to handle the information needed for core responsibilities. When an employee leaves a large spreadsheet that contains the analytic and prediction model, it is generally a VERY big job to maintain. The boss of the unit realized that small R scripts could do a lot of the work and that dataframes and spreadsheets are relatively easy to interchange if one avoids fancy features. Thus it was feasible to use spreadsheets for data entry -- reducing training costs and "I don't know R" etc., though with some risks -- and have some youngish new hires write the scripts to do the analysis and reports that were needed every few days. If the folk involved are reading this, I'll apologize in advance for over-simplifying.
The central theme here is "economic", in that it is making life easier for all. John Nash ______________________________________________ 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.
