R help - Jul 2005 - R integration with Microsoft Powerpoint

Please allow me an unusual question.
 
Is there any way that R can be closely integrated with a Microsoft
Powerpoint presentation? I would like to embed R calculations in
Powerpoint so that I will start Powerpoint, be prompted to enter some
parameters, and an R function will run and return values and graphs.
 
Thanks,
John 
 
R 2.1.1
windows 2k
 
John Sorkin M.D., Ph.D.
Chief, Biostatistics and Informatics
Baltimore VA Medical Center GRECC and
University of Maryland School of Medicine Claude Pepper OAIC
 
University of Maryland School of Medicine
Division of Gerontology
Baltimore VA Medical Center
10 North Greene Street
GRECC (BT/18/GR)
Baltimore, MD 21201-1524
 
410-605-7119 
- NOTE NEW EMAIL ADDRESS:
jsorkin@grecc.umaryland.edu

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On Fri, 1 Jul 2005, John Sorkin wrote:
> Please allow me an unusual question.
>
> Is there any way that R can be closely integrated with a Microsoft
> Powerpoint presentation? I would like to embed R calculations in
> Powerpoint so that I will start Powerpoint, be prompted to enter some
> parameters, and an R function will run and return values and graphs.
R can be driven by COM, so if Powerpoint supports COM (possibly via VBA)
this would be possible.  It is likely, as other MS Office applications do.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
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

Sure.  Just run R in a BAT file.  You just reference the BAT file in
PowerPoint like any other EXE application via an OLE link.   Of course you
can always use VBA code in Powerpoint to Shell() to the BAT program.

In R, type ?BATCH to see how the BAT file's content line should be coded to
run the R program.

mailto:khobson at odot.org
Kenneth Ray Hobson, P.E.
Oklahoma DOT - QA & IAS Manager
200 N.E. 21st Street
Oklahoma City, OK  73105-3204
(405) 522-4985, (405) 522-0552 fax

Visit our website at:
http://www.okladot.state.ok.us/materials/materials.htm

Of course there are many ways to do it.

The user input could come from R dialogs via the tcltk package or the
Input() dialogs from VBA in Powerpoint.

I chose the output as PDF.  The R source code called cars.r, might go
something like:

pdf(file=paste(getwd(), "/", "cars.pdf", sep=""),
  width = 8.5, height = 11, onefile = TRUE, family = "Helvetica",
    title = "R Graphics Output", fonts = NULL, version =
"1.1")
plot(cars)
lines(lowess(cars))
graphics.off()
shell(paste(getwd(), "/", "cars.pdf",
sep=""),wait=FALSE) #veiw PDF
stop("all done")

The cars.bat file, might go something like:

"C:\Program Files\R\rw2010\bin\R.exe" CMD BATCH c:\myfiles\r\cars.r
#Change the drives and paths to R.exe and the cars.r files.

The cars.bat file was played from PowerPoint by creating the object and
doubleclicking in the slideshow.  The are other ways to do it of course.
In PowerPoint, click the menu item Insert | Object | Create and browse to
and select the cars.r file.  I set the object as an icon and used the R.exe
icon.

VBA scripting to play the cars.bat file is not all that involved either.
_______
mailto:khobson at odot.org
Kenneth Ray Hobson, P.E.
Oklahoma DOT - QA & IAS Manager
200 N.E. 21st Street
Oklahoma City, OK  73105-3204
(405) 522-4985, (405) 522-0552 fax

Visit our website at:
http://www.okladot.state.ok.us/materials/materials.htm

>...snip...In PowerPoint, click the menu item Insert | Object | Create and
browse to
and select the cars.r file. ...snip...
In the previous post snippet above, replace cars.r with cars.bat.

To run the cars.bat program via VBA, I would typically insert a button.  To
do so in PowerPoint, right click the toolbar, select Control Toolbar and
then click the button icon.  Right click and drag and draw the button onto
the slide.  Double click the button object and add code something like:

Private Sub CommandButton1_Click()
Shell ("c:\myfiles\r\cars.bat")
End Sub

When passing input to a program like R, I typically use VBA's Input() and
write the results to a TXT file.  This is then easily read into R.

mailto:khobson at odot.org
Kenneth Ray Hobson, P.E.
Oklahoma DOT - QA & IAS Manager
200 N.E. 21st Street
Oklahoma City, OK  73105-3204
(405) 522-4985, (405) 522-0552 fax

Visit our website at:
http://www.okladot.state.ok.us/materials/materials.htm