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Comment by Shamanmuni | Hacker News Reader

You can do that perfectly well with R. Heck, R was designed with that kind of workloads in mind. With RStudio you can even present a table which the non-programmers can directly manipulate to test those conditions.

I usually use spreadsheets only as data entry software and then R does the rest.

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If your data is entered in a spreadsheet, is it really faster and easier for you to run the data through another tool, rather than just writing the formulas right there in front of you?

You definitely can do it in R, but the formulas are trivial anyway and writing them in code takes as much time as in Excel, can you help me understand what I could gain by using R here?

I imagine that the spreadsheet is there to support an easy input format that anyone can get involved with. The spreadsheet basically only holds the assumptions and the facts. Then all the modeling is done in something where following the flow control is far more readable because you're dealing with long well named variables, which are rare to none existent in most spreadsheets.

When I worked in Wall Street level finance, basically none of the analysts bothered to use anything more than cell address, e.g. /[A-Z]\{0,1}[0-9]\{0,3}/. They basically treated naming their variables like most software engineers treat commenting their code. That shit was impossible to follow because.

The individual formulas may be trivial, but when you have a complex model with many pages representing different aspects of the business internally and external macro aspects, it can get messy fast.

No doubt, but I would be very surprised if one could set up an R simulation quicker than one could set up a comparable spreadsheet. I don't see R and spreadsheets as interchangeable. They are very complimentary technologies.

This looks promising: http://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/R_and_Calc

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