[R] Easy, Robust and Stable GUI???

[Michael Bibo]

pat_primate (sent by Nabble.com <lists <at> nabble.com> writes:

> I know that this isn't really a R help question, but I am a psychology 
student at TRU (tru.ca) and my psych
> department is going to be switching statistical software in the near 
future.  I thought this might be a good
> oppertunity to advocate for open source if an acceptable option is 
available.  I have looked around a bit
> and R seems to be the most stable and mature (not to mention powerful) open 
source statistical program
> going.  The only downfall is that the school has been using spss for years 
and would demand a similarly user
> friendly GUI based statistical program to replace it.  I have looked at a 
few of the R guis and most of them
> look like they are just command line interfaces in pretty desktop windows 
and not really a gui like spss.  If
> anyone knows of any stable, userfriendly and robust guis for R that would be 
similar to using spss please
> let me know, as I would love for my scho
>  ol to start embracing open source software.


I too am trying to move my organisation from SPSS to R.  While it is well 
worth considering the various command line vs GUI arguments, I appreciate that 
an easy to use GUI is important when weaning oneself and others from a system 
such as SPSS.

I would suggest you have a look at R-Commander.  It is available simply as an 
R package from CRAN (Rcmdr).  It has a familiar, menu-driven interface for a 
good range of data manipulation and analysis tasks, but without losing the 
power of the command line option.  It is actively developed, and John Fox is 
very approachable.  Perhaps most importantly, it is extensible, so you can 
tailor it to suit, and add functions to the menu system.

Michael Bibo
Queensland Health
michael_bibo at health.qld.gov.au