R help - Feb 2004 - Gnumeric - 1 Excel - ?

Hi all,

As happens from time to time, discussions on this list appear regarding
the use of popular spreadsheets for statistical analysis. One such
thread (post of mine) is here:

http://maths.newcastle.edu.au/~rking/R/help/03a/6326.html

While not advocating such use, these discussions have referenced
articles that provide independent reviews of these applications and
issues of accuracy, etc.

Based upon a posting to Linux Today
(http://linuxtoday.com/news/2004022600226OSBZGN), I became aware this
evening of a new paper by the well known B.D. McCullough, who has
published many such reviews of both spreadsheets and other statistical
applications.

In the latest paper (pdf available from
http://www.csdassn.org/software_reports.html), Prof. McCullough reviews
Gnumeric as an example of how an open source project has responded to
prior criticism of issues, while raising well known issues with Excel,
at least through XP. He leaves open to further research, any
improvements to Excel 2003.

One lingering criticism is Gnumeric's RNG, however Prof. McCullough (who
references Prof. Ripley's 1990 PRNG paper) indicates in this article
that the Gnumeric team has incorporated the Mersenne Twister to a beta
version of Gnumeric, which may already have been released by now. This
modification ameliorates this concern.

For those wishing to stay abreast of such issues, this new paper may be
of interest. It puts the open source efforts of the Gnumeric team
(http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric/) in a very favorable light.

Best regards,

Marc Schwartz

Marc Schwartz <MSchwartz at medanalytics.com> writes:
> For those wishing to stay abreast of such issues, this new paper may be
> of interest. It puts the open source efforts of the Gnumeric team
> (http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric/) in a very favorable light.
Thanks.  

For those using gnumeric to munge excel data, be careful.  Very
careful.  Just found a spreadsheet with "missing" columns (exist in
excel, and do not display in gnumeric).

If I'd known they were there, I'd not have had to recopy from an older
dataset.  Realigning/merging at 4am isn't fun.

Alternatively, if I had exported first into R (via CSV), I'd have
found them.

Not sure what the lesson is, but at 5am, I'm just not too sure about
anything except that I've now got a clean and validated dataset.

best,
-tony

-- 
rossini at u.washington.edu            http://www.analytics.washington.edu/ 
Biomedical and Health Informatics   University of Washington
Biostatistics, SCHARP/HVTN          Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
UW (Tu/Th/F): 206-616-7630 FAX=206-543-3461 | Voicemail is unreliable
FHCRC  (M/W): 206-667-7025 FAX=206-667-4812 | use Email

CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE: This e-mail message and any attachme...{{dropped}}