R help - Jan 2002 - question from a beginner

Dear there,
   R is pretty flexible and powerful. I wonder whether there are any GUI
programs to
 do basic statistic work by just clicking menu and selecting procedure.
   Thank you for your time.
Yiling

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No, not really.
  There are some facilities if you want to *design* GUIs for other people
to use, e.g. the Tcl/Tk extensions or Rweb (www.math.montana.edu/Rweb/),
but nothing where you can start from scratch with an arbitrary set of
data.  R is much more process-oriented: if you know what you want to do
(linear regression, ANOVA, etc.), it should be fairly easy to find the
commands that do what you want.  S-PLUS has GUI facilities, although I
haven't tried them.  I think there is a fairly strong philosophy among
most R developers that the "right" way to do things is to learn some
of
the underlying foundations so that you can really understand what you are
doing.  It is easier to go wrong with GUIs -- although there are lots of
confounding factors, and GUIs can be designed in better or worse ways.

  Ben

On Wed, 30 Jan 2002, Cheng, Yiling wrote:
> Dear there,
>    R is pretty flexible and powerful. I wonder whether there are any GUI
> programs to
>  do basic statistic work by just clicking menu and selecting procedure.
>    Thank you for your time.
> Yiling
>
>
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> r-help mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html
> Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe"
> (in the "body", not the subject !)  To: r-help-request at
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>
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>
-- 
318 Carr Hall                                bolker at zoo.ufl.edu
Zoology Department, University of Florida    http://www.zoo.ufl.edu/bolker
Box 118525                                   (ph)  352-392-5697
Gainesville, FL 32611-8525                   (fax) 352-392-3704

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Ben Bolker wrote, in reply to Yiling Chen's inquiry about whether there were
GUI-driven stat.s programs:
>  No, not really.
No doubt it all depends on exactly what one has in mind, but I should have
said that there *many* programs that offered access to statistical
procedures via "point and click" methods, from Excel upwards through
SPSS
and on to S-Plus.

Which you recommend should depend on the needs of the audience.

Even Excel, in spite of its well-documented defects, has a place; as a way
of luring generalist students into getting to grips with the nuts and bolts
of statistics it is unrivalled, since knowledge of Excel is clearly a
marketable skill in its own right.

For a slightly different student audience I think DataDesk is very
attractive.

And for fine control over the appearance of charts S-Plus's GUI mode is
superb. I should be very interested to hear, for example, of ways in which
R, or S-Plus in command-line mode, can be made to control chart grids in the
way that the S-Plus GUI can.

Julian Wells
OU Business School
The Open University
Walton Hall
Milton Keynes
MK7 6AA
United Kingdom
+44 1908 654658

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