Syncing files across computers using DropBox

Motivation

In the past few months I have been using DropBox for syncing my work files between my home and work computer. It has saved me from numerous mistakes and from sending the files to myself via e-mail.

Recently I found this service highly useful for sharing files with 4 other people with whom I am working on a data analysis project. Being so happy with it (and also by gaining more storage space by inviting friends to use it), I thought of sharing my experience here with other R users that might benefit from this cool (free) service.

What is Dropbox?

Dropbox is a Software/Web2.0 file hosting service which enable users to synchronize files and folders between computers across the internet.
This is done by installing a software and then picking a “shared folder” on your computer. From that moment on, that folder will be synced with any computer you choose to install the software on (for example, your home/work computer, your laptop – and so on)

DropBox also enables users to share some of their folders with other DropBox users. This seamless integration of the service with your OS file system (Windows, Mac or Linux) is what’s making this service so comfortable, by allowing me to work with co-workers and have the same “project tree” of folders, all of which are always synced.

You could also share a file “online”, by getting a link to it which you could share with others. So for example, you could write an R code, share it online, and call to it later with source(). This is the easiest way I know of how to do this.

Dropbox is a “cloud computing” Web2.0 file hosting service offering both free and paid services. The free version (which I use) offers 2GB of “shared storage” (unless you invite other users, in which case you get some extended storage space. Which is one of my motivations in writing this post).

Dropbox has other non-trivial uses allowing one to:

The service’s major competitors are Box.net, Sugarsync and Mozy, non of which I have had the chance of trying.

How to start?

Simply go to: DropBox.com
Sign up, install the software, use the new shared folder, and let me know if it helped you 🙂

How to get Extra space?

You can:

  • Earn another 750MB of space by connecting your dropbox to your twitter/facebook account and sending a status update about them. To get this bonus, head over to “Get extra space free!” page.
  • Refer a friend to open a dropbox account (every friend joining earns you another 250MB of space). This bonus is bounded by a total of 8GB of added space (after that, you won’t be allowed any more extra space)
  • Upgrade – pay 10$ a month and get extra 50GB

Helping the blind use R – by exporting R console to Word

Update (2016-01-30): This post is quite old (from 2010), these days it should be easier to have your R output readable by using the knitr package. It allows you to take an R script file and create an HTML output from it using the stitch_rhtml function.

You should also read the article by Jonathan R. Godfrey: Statistical Software from a Blind Person’s Perspective. And have a look at his BrailleR R package.

Preface – R seems a natural fit for the blind statistician

For blind people who wish to do statistics, R can be ideal. R command line interface offers straight forward statistical scripting in the form of question (what is the mean of x) followed by an answer (0.2). That is, instead of point-and-click dialog boxes with jumping windows of results that GUI statistical systems offer.

But there are still more hurdles to face before R can offer a perfect solution to the blind.
In this post I would like to address just one such problem – reading R console output.

Directing R console output to word – to allow blind people to easily navigate in it

Recently, a question was posed in the R-help mailing list by a guy names Faiz, a blind new user of R. Faiz wants to direct R output into word, to allow him to be able to read it. Here is what he wrote:

I would like to read the results of the commands type in the terminal window in Microsoft Word. As a blind user my options are somewhat limited and are time consuming if I want to see the results of the commands that I have type earlier. for example if my first two commands were
x<-c(1,2,3,4,5)
mean(x)
and I have typed ten more commands after the first two commands it is not easy for me to see that what was the result of mean(x)
but if I can somehow divert the results of the commands to Microsoft Word it is comparatively easy for me to see what was the result of mean(x) and what were the results of other commands. One another advantage of diverting R’s output to Microsoft Word for me is that from there they can be easily copied into assignments as well.

Faiz later elaborated more on his issue:

I am using Windows XP, and using a screen reader called JAWS. When I type something at the console, I hear once what I have typed, and then the focus is on the next line. Then if I press the up arrow key I get to hear the function I just typed, not its output. For example if I type mean(x) and then I press enter I will hear “[5]” if it is the mean of x. Then I will hear “>”. Now if I want to find out what was the mean of x by pressing the
up arrow key, I will only hear mean(x) and I will not hear [5].
My screen reader does provide options to use different cursors to read command lines.
but if I have typed median(x) sd(x) var(x) length(x) after typing mean(x), it takes a long time before I can move my cursor to the location where I can hear the mean of x. If the results of the commands can be diverted to MS Word it becomes comparatively easy for me to quickly move forward and backward in the document.

Any ideas and suggestions are appreciated.

Since recently I reviewed how one could export R output to MS-Word with R2wd, It was only fitting to try and implement R2wd for this problem.
I went looking on how to direct R console into a txt file, so I could later dump it into word. I found that two commands gave me half of what I wanted. sink() allows me to direct R output to a txt file, and savehistory() can save the command history into a txt file. But I needed something that combines the two and captures all of R console output into a file.
Failing to locate one, I turned to the R mailing list. Among the kind people trying to help (Thank you David Winsemius, Bert Gunter and Duncan Murdoch) Greg Snow came through in supplying the help (not surprisingly…).
Greg directed me to a function he wrote called txtStart() (from the TeachingDemos package), which operates in a similar way as sink(), only it also captures the R commands that where used – exactly what I was looking for!

Based on this, I devised two functions that can be used to redirect R output into word.

Here is how to use them:

# Step 1: reading the functions needed for this task, from the file I uploaded to www.r-statistics.com
source("https://www.r-statistics.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/R-console-to-word.r.txt")
# Example:
# Step 2 - start capturing
txtStart.2wd()	# start capturing text.  If you are missing any packages - this function will prompt you to install them
				# IF the installation fails - consider changing your mirror location
# Step 3 - run R code
	date()
	x

For me, this worked…

If you would like R to automatically run in the startup the code needed to get the two functions: txtStart.2wd and txtStop.2wd , you can run this in your R console: (once is enough)

# Start of code
Rprofile.site.loc

Bringing R to the blind: there is much more work a head!

Until this point, it didn’t cross my mind to ask how can R be used by the blind. But once this question was raised – it brings with it many more questions.
Can R be adjusted to easily be read by known aids to sight impaired people? (I am sure Linux users here will have much to add)
Can people in the community think of writing function to turn R output into a more easily read text for the blind?
For example – the summary() command is wonderful for me. But I am trying to imagine how it would look like in the “eyes” of a person who can’t see. Surly there could be some way to turn the wide summary format into a long format.
Perhaps there is room for a more general approach to the question of how to help blind people to be able to use R.
And is there a need? How many blind people choose to pursue studying statistics (or disciplines for which they would need to know statistics/R)?
I hope to read your thoughts on the matter.

On a personal note: My father was on the verge of blindness, prior to his cataract surgery. I saw first hand how the life of the sight-impaired can look like. Giving people in that situation help is a great MITZVA (a.k.a: “good deed” in Hebrew).

useR-2010 is looking for a T-shirt design

Katharine Mullen has just published on the R mailing list a call for designeRs who might be willing to design a T-shirt aRt design for the shirt that will be given in useR 2010.

I consider such contests as one of those good-for-the-community things, and hope regular useRs, R bloggers, and companies that are based on R – will consider spreading the word, participating in it (and maybe even offer more bonuses to the designers).

If you design something and put it on picasa or flickr, please tag it with “useR2010Tshirt” (and consider leaving a comment with a link to the design), so there could later be a follow up on your work. Even if you don’t “win” you will get positive “karma points” from the community 🙂 .

Here are the competition details, as published in the mailing list:
Continue reading “useR-2010 is looking for a T-shirt design”

Exporting R output to MS-Word with R2wd (an example session)

UPDATE (2014-11-02): please note that this post is from 2010. These days, it is much simpler to create docx files from R using knitr+pandoc. Using pander (links: [1], [2]) can also help make the markdown output look nicer in the file.

Creating reports is one of the basic tasks in data analysis. R provides numerous functions and packages to export it’s (beautiful) output and help compile it into a report.

In this post I will present one such (basic) solution for Windows OS users for exporting R output into Microsoft Word using the R2wd (package). There are more ways and strategies for doing this, and if encouraged by comments, I will gladly write more on the subject.
* * *

R to Word using {R2wd}

The package R2wd (available through CRAN) relies on rcom. It is a wrapper that uses the statconnDCOM server to communicate with MS-Word via the COM interface.

R2wd can perform the basic tasks you would expect to need when creating a report from R. It allows you to:

  • Create a new Word file
  • Create headers and sub-headers
  • Move to a new pages in the document
  • Write text
  • Insert tables (that is “data.frame” and “matrix”objects)
  • Insert plots
  • Save and close the Word document
  • …(and more)

The current R2wd can still be seen as being in BETA stages.  Some features are not yet available, such as:

  • Choosing text font (which means most of us will need to manually change the font in the document to “couriers new…”, in order for the formatting to look good)
  • Inserting of complex object outputs (such as summery.lm, although in the example bellow I show how that can be achieved using a simple function)
  • Speed – the speed of inserting a table is somewhat slow, I am not sure how it would scale to large documents

But from a (pleasant) correspondence with the package developer, I was assured the next release will supply us with more options and features.

R2wd package developer, Christan Ritter, invites feedback from users.  So if you have features you are missing in this packages, I believe he would like to know about it (you can e-mail Christan at:     christian.ritter <-at-> ridaco <-dot-> be  )

Getting R2wd 1.3

The current version of R2wd is 1.1 and Christan Ritter (the package developer), says it is a “first idea” and that a more elaborate version will soon (e.g: around July) be available on CRAN.   In the meantime, Christan was so kind as to send me a more recent version of the package, which you (until it gets uploaded to CRAN), you are welcome to download from here:
R2wd 1.3 download link

How to use R2wd to create a report – a sample session

Being young doesn’t prevent from R2wd to do some nice things.

Here is the text from the library(help=R2wd) :

If Word is not already running, wdGet() opens a new Word document, otherwise, it establishes a COM handle to the instance which is already running. The functions wdTitle, wdHeader, wdBody, and wdParagraph can be used to inject text elements into Word. Moreover, bookmarks can be added via wdInsertBookmarks and wdGoToBookmark allows to navigate among the bookmarks which also exist. There is another set of convenience functions, wdSection, wdSubsection, and wdSubsubsection which insert headers of level 1, 2, or 3, start new ’Sections’ in Word, and add bookmarks.
Graphs and dataframes can be inserted intoWord, by the wdPlot, wdTable commands. The wdTable command takes a dataframe or an array as arguments, creates a Word table of the appropriate dimensions and injects the content of the dataframe or array into it. It then formats the table in Word using elementary formating elements.
The functions wdApplyTheme and wdApplyTemplate allow to work with themes and templates.

Here is an example sessions to demonstrate some of what is said:

# install.packages("R2wd")
# library(help=R2wd)
require(R2wd)


wdGet(T)	# If no word file is open, it will start a new one - can set if to have the file visiable or not
wdNewDoc("c:\This.doc")	# this creates a new file with "this.doc" name

wdApplyTemplate("c:\This.dot")	# this applies a template


wdTitle("Examples of R2wd (a package to write Word documents from R)")	# adds a title to the file

wdSection("Example 1 - adding text", newpage = T) # This can also create a header

wdHeading(level = 2, "Header 2")
wdBody("This is the first example we will show")
wdBody("(Notice how, by using two different lines in wdBody, we got two different paragraphs)")
wdBody("(Notice how I can use this: ' n' (without the space), to  n  go to the next
		line)")
wdBody("האם זה עובד בעברית ?")
wdBody("It doesn't work with Hebrew...")
wdBody("O.k, let's move to the next page (and the next example)")

wdSection("Example 2 - adding tables", newpage = T)
wdBody("Table using 'format'")
wdTable(format(head(mtcars)))
wdBody("Table without using 'format'")
wdTable(head(mtcars))


wdSection("Example 3 - adding lm summary", newpage = T)

## Example from  ?lm
ctl

Update:
Upon reading my post, Chris suggested that I’ll also add a note here about SWORD, a tool written by Thomas Baier (the creator of the StatconnDCOM server) which allows to include R-code in a Sweave-like fashion in Word documents. Here is a link to the project: http://rcom.univie.ac.at

The new GUI for ggplot2 (using Deducer) – the designer wants your opinion

After discovering that R is expected (this summer) to have a GUI for ggplot2 (through deducer), I later found Ian’s gsoc proposal for this GUI.  Since the system is in it’s early stages of development, Ian has invited people to give comments, input and critique on his plans for the project.

For your convenience (and with Ian’s permission), I am reposting his proposal here. You are welcome to send him feedback by e-mailing him (at: [email protected]), or by leaving a comment here (and I will direct him to your comment).

Continue reading “The new GUI for ggplot2 (using Deducer) – the designer wants your opinion”