On Fri, 2005-01-14 at 12:37 +0100, Henrik Andersson wrote: > I am moving to using R more and more as a computational platform and > I use Microsoft Excel at the moment in exactly the way you describe in > WRITING ASCII FILES as a staging area for data, to gather data and make > simple calculations. I've have experienced problems with saving to .csv > files, and not only using scientific notation. The problem occurs also > in normal notation if you choose to show only some decimals. > > That is a serious problem, what is the remedy? > > To always avoid showing only some decimals and avoid scientific notation > or does someone have a better solution, like a global option, Save with > full represention to .csv. > > I'm open for all sorts of suggestions, including ditching Excel...and > use ??? > > Cheers, Henrik
If you need to use a spreadsheet, for whatever reason, under Windows, I would suggest going to OpenOffice.org: http://www.openoffice.org/ When I was still running under Windows, I had notable problems saving sheets to CSV files using Excel. There would not only be issues with numeric formats, but also in dealing with blank cells. The latter resulting in an incorrect number of fields being created in the CSV file. This caused problems upon importing to R (ie. using read.csv()) whereby the number of fields in the header row did not match the number of fields in all of the data rows. OO.org's calc is _not_ better then Excel for actual analyses, since they are focused on matching Excel functionality, but for this one feature, it is far better IMHO. You might also want to keep an eye on Gnumeric, which is in the process of developing a Windows version: http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric/ HTH, Marc Schwartz ______________________________________________ R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html