Some time ago, since I was able to use R by myself, have found some fellows and other people who wanted to learn R as well. Then I pointed them to help pages, to CRAN repositories… but in some cases they said that didn’t know how to start using those resources. Obviously, the main self-perceived limitation for non-programmers is the use of “commands” -ok, many of the 80’s kids will remember the use of some command lines to access games such as PacMan, Frogger… 🙂
I use both GNU-Linux and Windows systems on a regular basis… so I’m aware of the advantages (more for GNU-Linux in my case) and disadvantages of both.
Recently I needed to analyse a database from a remote location, an Excel (`*xlsx) file.
The problem was that I couldn’t put my gdata library to work… some weird errors about a missing Perl interpreter… just needed to install one. Based on this tutorial in CRAN, I downloaded ActivePerl.