Is there a good R API for accessing Google Docs?

Question

I'm using R for data analysis, and I'm sharing some data with collaborators via Google docs. Is there a simple interface that I can use to access a R data.frame object to and from a Google Docs spreadsheet? If not, is there a similar API in other languages?

Answer 1

R can export tables CSV files. CSV files uploaded to Google Docs are opened as spreadsheets. Are you looking for something more automated?

Answer 2

There are two packages:

• RGoogleDocs on Omegahat: the package allows you to get a list of the documents and details about each of them, download the contents of a document, remove a document, and upload a document, even binary files.
• RGoogleData on RForge: provides R access to Google services through the Google supported Java API. Currently the R interface only supports Google Docs and Spreadsheets.

Answer 3

Since R itself is relatively limited when it comes to execution flow control, i suggest using an api to an high-level programming language provided by google: link text. There you can pick whichever you are most familiar with.

I for one always use python templates to give R a little more flexibility, so that would be a good combination.

For the task of exporting data from R to google docs, the first thing that comes to my mind would be to save it to csv, then parse and talk to g/docs with one of the given languages.