Office365 AddIns for R (Part II)

Introduction

In the previous post Office365 AddIns for R (Part I), I introduced the ExcelRAddIn. In this post I would like to describe the RScriptAddIn for Word. This allows you to run an R script ‘inline’ from within a Word document. I read R-bloggers regularly and I thought this add-in might be useful. In this post I will run through a simple demo.

RScriptAddIn

Imagine a situation where you want to write a document explaining how to use some feature of R, for example the F-test. You open Word and begin writing; you write the equations as usual:

and then you get to the section ‘Compute the F-test in R’. You write the corresponding R script in the document. The RScriptAddIn allows you to execute the script inline and to see the results.

Select the script, and from the Add-Ins menu select the Run Script button. The script is evaluated (assuming the path has been set up correctly - if not use the settings for this purpose) and the data is added to the R environment.

You continue writing the document and executing the R script.

One caveat here is that the F-test results are returned in an un-summarized form, and in this case there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to coerce the result to a data frame for improved tabular display. Therefore you may need to format this yourself.

I am looking for a way to improve this.

Wrap-up

As in the previous post, I want to reiterate that the projects are still in an ‘alpha’ stage, meaning you will need to download the project Office365Addins, build the Visual Studio solution, and install or run it directly from Visual Studio.