Combining a specialized data mining tool with a spreadsheet is a very interesting idea. Most of the people know handle a spreadsheet such as Excel (but also LibreOffice Calc, Open Office Calc, Gnumeric, etc.). It is really popular because it is a very easy to use tool for data manipulation.
Many data mining tools can read XLS or XLSX file formats. But, it is even more interesting to implement a bridge between the data mining tools and Excel in a bidirectional way. So, we can lead easily the whole analysis by navigating between the tools: transforming the variables into Excel, performing the analysis into the data mining tool, and post-processing the results into Excel.
In this tutorial, we describe RExcel library for R. It sets a new menu into Excel. Thus, we can send a dataset to R on the one hand; retrieve dataset or more generally a vector or a matrix from R on the other hand. The tool is really easy to use.
Keywords: data importation, excel file format, xls, xlsx, addin, add-in, addon, add-on, multiple linear regression
Components: lm, stepAIC, predict
Tutorial: en_Tanagra_RExcel.pdf
Dataset: ventes_regression_rexcel.zip
References :
T. Baier, E. Neuwirth, "Powerful data analysis from inside your favorite application"
