R help - Dec 2006 - Is there a better way for inputing data manually?

Dear All,

I have worked with R for some time. It's a great tool for data analysis. But
it's too hard to inputing raw data manually with R (I don't mean
importing data. R is good at importing data). Maybe it's not a focused topic
in this list, but I don't know other place where I can ask the question. How
do you do when inputing data from a paper material, such as questionnaire, or
what do you use ?

Best wishes,
Wei-Wei

On 12/1/2006 11:00 PM, Wei-Wei Guo wrote:
> Dear All,
> 
> I have worked with R for some time. It's a great tool for data
analysis. But it's too hard to inputing raw data manually with R (I
don't mean importing data. R is good at importing data). Maybe it's not
a focused topic in this list, but I don't know other place where I can ask
the question. How do you do when inputing data from a paper material, such as
questionnaire, or what do you use ?
I would not use R for this.  Depending on how many questionnaires I had, 
from small number to large, I would use:

1.  A text file.
2.  A spreadsheet, like Excel, or the OpenOffice one, or the R data editor.
3.  A custom program written specifically to handle the particular 
questionnaire.

You can do 1 and 2 in R, but you can't do them as well as programs 
dedicated to those tasks, and you can't do 3 at all well.  It depends a 
lot on the specific conventions of the platform you're working on.  R is 
aimed at writing cross-platform programs, and isn't particularly good at 
writing GUI programs, which is what you want here.  I would personally 
use Delphi for this, but there are lots of alternatives.

Duncan Murdoch