On Thu, 9 Sep 2004, Ritter, Christian C MCIL-CTANL/S wrote: > (R 1.9.1; Windows 2000;) > > I'm just comparing ease of use, speed, etc for methods of transferring > data frames in the Excel, MySQL, R triangle. It turns out that going > from Excel to R (when doing this carefully). Using the clipboard is > actually quite fast and efficient (2 seconds for transferring 120 000 > cells on a common desktop computer as compared to much longer for going > the RODBC route, maybe also substantially longer using the R(D)COM > route). Other advantage: Relatively flexible handling of missing values > from Excel which may be "empty", "#N/A", etc.
You clearly haven't looked at RODBC carefully as that has equally flexible handling. > So I thought I would also look at ways of going back via the clipboard. > There I'm hitting a funny snag. The documentation explains that there is > a 32KB limit on writing to the clipboard. This may make sense as a > default, but does it make sense as a hard restriction? I guess you are talking about using file="clipboard" in a connection, but there is also writeClipboard, whose documentation does not mention a limit. My Windows documentation says there is a 32Kb limit on the size of an text object put on the clipboard, and I believe that is the case for Windows 95/98/ME at least. So a hard restriction makes sense. > Any ideas of getting around this limitation (besides cumbersome R-code > buffering/breaking up the frame to send into small pieces to be > collected and assembled in Excel? R is Open Source, so this is an opportunity for you to experiment, test on various versions of Windows and contribute a patch back to the R project. -- Brian D. Ripley, [EMAIL PROTECTED] Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/ University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self) 1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA) Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595 ______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
