[R] Question about R software and output

Tue Oct 3 17:06:43 CEST 2023

Charity,

As some of the answers I have seen show, your question is not clear.

You need to be clear on what you mean about R software and other concepts
before an answer makes sense.

The Base version of R may come on your computer already but likely has been
installed from some external source, or updated and the CRAN mirrors are one
such installation. As far as I know, it downloads the main R software as
well as packages considered important as part of that distribution and from
then on, you can disconnect your computer from any network and it will work
fine for any programs that operate only locally. 

Of course any program you run that wishes to access external resources can
do so. In particular, it is quite common for you at the prompt, or within an
R program, to ask for a package stored externally to be placed within your
computer but once done, it remains there until and unless you want to get a
newer version or something.

There are packages that include data within themselves and may well be some
that dynamically go out and get info from somewhere but I know of no simple
way to find out other than reading the source code or seeing what happens if
you disconnect from the internet.

Your mention of EXCEL also needs clarification. EXCEL has absolutely nothing
to do with R. It is an unrelated product and you do not need to have it
installed to run R and vice versa. That does not mean your program cannot
interact with EXCEL or the files it makes, just that it is not part of base
R. R does allow importing data (locally or not) in lots of formats including
some that EXCEL can save data in. But generally, internal to R there are
storage methods such as the data.frame that hold data and manipulate it and
a typical R program may read in some data from files like .CSV that can be
saved from EXCEL or many other sources or with the proper packages, you can
read directly from more native EXCEL formats such as XLSX files. And, you
can write out results in many ways using packages that include those
formats.

Once data has been received, I know of no way in R that tags it with the
source of the data as being internal or external. Often the fact that
something is external is well hidden as many R packages have ways to access
external data as if it were local.

Perhaps you can explain more clearly what your concerns are. But note R is
not atypical among computer languages and many others might share the same
issues that concern you. 

Avi

-----Original Message-----
From: R-help <r-help-bounces using r-project.org> On Behalf Of Ferguson Charity
(CEMINFERGUSON)
Sent: Monday, October 2, 2023 3:49 AM
To: r-help using r-project.org
Subject: [R] Question about R software and output

To whom it may concern,

My understanding is that the R software is downloaded from a CRAN network
and data is imported into it using Microsoft Excel for example. Could I
please just double check whether any data or results from the output is held
on external servers or is it just held on local files on the computer?

Many thanks,

Charity

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