#30 Matlab2R, MSOfficeDocs with R

Eduard Parsadanyan will give a talk about Corporate reporting with R: create and manipulate MS Office documents.
Philip Rausch will outine an approach to calling deployed Matlab functions from within R.

Longer info:

Eduard Parsadanyan will give a talk "Corporate reporting with R: create and manipulate MS Office documents"

R has plenty of ways to create reports. Many of them are nice and fancy; however, in reality, some restrictions may apply. In a corporate world, there is a standard requirement to use MS Office documents such as .docx and .pptx. Even though it is possible, e.g. converting Markdown into a Word document, I have found a better way to create .docx files from R directly.

There is an excellent package called officer and a set of accompanying packages (flextable + rvg + mschart). Good news is that they don't even require an MS Office installation in the system.

During the presentation, I will show how to create a .docx report from a template file and populate it with common elements, such as text, tables, charts, TOC, sections, page headers, and footers.

Philip Rausch (Humboldt Universität zu Berlin) will give a talk outlining a new approach to calling deployed Matlab functions from R, which allows to combine Matlab-based backends with R wrapper functions and only requires the user to install the freely available Matlab Runtime Environment. He will introduce the general approach, illustrate it with examples from different packages currently under development, talk about aspects of the custom C-interface and address pros, cons and challenges related to technical and licensing aspects. While the corresponding packages are currently in their final stages of development with some issues left to address, Philip is looking forward to spreading the news and getting your feedback.

As usual there will be an Open-Mike Session for short announcements, and some time for networking, before and after the talks. This time we'll also give away some free tickets to the conference "H2O World", happening in London this year (Oct 30). Jo-fai Chow from the H2O.ai project (an opensource ai platform) will donate the tickets.