[TxMt] Spreadsheets in Textmate

[Charilaos Skiadas]

On Apr 21, 2006, at 6:15 PM, Jeffrey Robert Spies wrote:

> I'm not exactly sure what the interest is in having a powerful  
> spreadsheet in textmate, as there are some fine open source  
> alternatives,

namely? Please don't say OpenOffice or NeoOffice, because they are  
bloated and slow for my purposes. I don't need it to be extremely  
powerful, but I do need it to be fast to load, easy to edit, and easy  
to create new functions if I want to. For instance, one key function  
i want to is to be able, from a list of cells, to produce the average  
of the list after dropping the lowest 3 grades, without having to  
manually sort the rows that I want to do this in. I just haven't  
found a way to do it efficiently in NeoOffice, which is what I use  
when I do need a spreadsheet these days (well, up until now :) ).

I'll also not accept solutions that require X11 and/or are not too  
easy to install. But if you have some projects in mind. (R.app might  
do it, I haven't tried it yet. Does it offer a spreadsheet way of  
editing data?)

> but piping commands through R (maybe even using R syntax in your  
> "spreadsheet" file) could rapidly give you additional functionality.
>
> Google R if you haven't heard of it,

Using R actually sounds like a pretty good good idea, though I don't  
know much about it yet.
I actually thought that googling just "r" would be useless, and tried  
"R language" instead, which indeed gave me some links and much to  
think about. But it turns out, that searching for "r" also returns  
the right answer :)

I'll have to look into R more in the future anyway, since I'll be  
teaching a number of Applied Statistics courses next year.
I'll try to incorporate this as an option, like having rows starting  
with "%R" be passed to R for processing.

Haris