Viewing tables of data in R

I've mostly used head(), tail(), and View() to look at tables in R, but I wonder if anyone uses anything more sophisticated. I recall reading that there were R <-> Excel interfaces available (based on COM or XLLoop?) - does anyone use one to use Excel (or OpenOffice) to display data frames during an R session, and not necessarily just result the final result exported to a csv file?

Edit: Thanks for all the suggestions. I guess I should have specified that I was running 开发者_StackOverflowEmacs+ESS on a Mac primarily (which disqualifies COM and Deducer), though I also switch to Linux and Windows on occasion. I guess View() still is the best multi-platform solution that I could find...

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You can use the basic data editor to view the data

edit(your.data.frame)

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You can run utils::View(data).

Another option would be to open a new RStudio window. One can do this (on linux at least) simply by running in the terminal : rstudio If one wants to be able to close the terminal afterwards, just run

nohup rstudio &

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Yes, I sometimes use Excel to view data from R during a session. I recommend looking at this blog post on the Learning R blog. I use the RDCOMClient; it allows for more than just export/import, but the trade-off is added complexity.

Edit: There are several other solutions that are non-COM based in that blog post, including using ODBC.

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Another elegant option would be to use the DT package

if (!require("DT")) devtools::install_github("rstudio/DT")

datatable(iris)

This will open a paginated, sortable and filterable table in your browser. See http://rstudio.github.io/DT/ for examples.

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I use the following function to look at a sample of lines from a dataframe... I keep it in my startup and use it all the time to run checks... frequently I'll run this a couple of times...

#
# sample a couple of lines from a data frame
#
sample.df <- function(df, n=3, ordered=TRUE) {
    if(ordered) {
            df[sort(sample(nrow(df), min(nrow(df), n))),]
    } else {
            df[sample(nrow(df), min(nrow(df), n)),]
    }
}

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Deducer's Data Viewer.

Form the manual:

The data viewer can be accessed using either deducer("Data viewer") or the data.viewer() function

There are many other useful features there, all of them available from command interface.

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fix works for me

also my.df[seq(1, nrow(my.df), nrow(my.df)/30),]

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As edit is too basic, I tend to just open tables in Excel while using R. To do so I write the data to a temporary file, and open it with Excel:

open_in_excel <- function(some_df){
    tFile<-tempfile(fileext=paste0(substitute(some_df), ".tsv"),tmpdir="~/tmp")
    write.table(some_df, tFile, row.names=F, sep="\t", quote=F)
    system(paste('open -a \"/Applications//Microsoft Office 2011/Microsoft Excel.app\"', tFile))
}

open_in_excel(iris)

For sure the system call needs to be adjusted to the used OS and the installation path of Excel.