Thursday, August 16, 2007

iWork '08 Spelunking.

Fiddling around with iWork '08 a bit and Numbers support is trivial to add to the R GUI. Basically, it exports a tab delimited version as text, much like Excel, though it uses the more modern pasteboard type (where Excel exports a much less useful string). We can detect that it is numbers from the metadata and "native" pasteboard types and throw up the same dialog as for the Excel pasting. Yay!

I'm thinking, for symmetry, that I should let you right click on a data frame in the workspace and copy as a tab delimited type for pasting into Excel/Numbers as well.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Mossberg had some pretty mixed feelings about it...http://www.thenewsroom.com/details/603927?c_id=wom-bc-js

Byron said...

I thought his review was really weird. Half his complaints were that things wouldn't translate well between Office. This shouldn't be surprising as not even Microsoft can manage that feat and they have the source code!

All told, the Keynote upgrade is worth the price of admission. By "not many new features" Walt does something of a disservice. The "voiceover" feature alone is genius---export a Flash version of your presentation with the actual timings you used and your voiceover? I would have killed for that feature six months ago when I tried to do it with iMovie.

In any case, yeah, Numbers doesn't have stuff like Pivot Tables and Chi-square tests, but now you can copy and paste to/from R so... problem solved. :-)

When I get around to it, I'll check out Open/StarOffice on OS X as well to see if we can't support them too.