Thank you Adrian. Your response was very informative. ?downloadDocument filled me with excitement untill I read, "If you try to download a spreadsheet with multiple worksheets into a 'csv' or 'tsv' format, only the first worksheet will be downloaded."
So now there is a convenient fast way to read data under two circumstances 1. if the spreadsheet has been published<http://blog.revolution-computing.com/2009/09/how-to-use-a-google-spreadsheet-as-data-in-r.html> 2. if one only wants the first sheet (RGoogleData's downloadDocument()). Farrel Buchinsky Google Voice Tel: (412) 567-7870 Sent from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 09:32, Adrian Dragulescu <adria...@eskimo.com>wrote: > > Farrel, > > Please read the manuals. On the RGoogleData package page you can read: > "The package provides R access to Google services through the Google > supported Java API. > > [...] > > A package with very similar functionality is maintained by Duncan Temple > Lang at \url{http://www.omegahat.org/RGoogleDocs/}. The approach taken > there is to use \code{RCurl} and \code{XML} to interact with the lower > level Google HTML protocol. You should check it out too." > > Regarding the questions you have about speed. Google spreadsheets is > labeled Labs, mabye there are performance issues on Google side. The > approach for both RGoogleDocs and RGoogleData is to make requests to the > Google servers and parse the XML results. RGoogleDocs parses using a C > library, RGoogleData uses a Java library. Going through the Java interface > is an extra step, so that might explain the speed difference. > > Check ?downloadDocument if you want to download the entire document. It > should be fast. You can load it into R after that. > > Best, > Adrian > > > > On Wed, 9 Dec 2009, Farrel Buchinsky wrote: > > Both of these applications fulfill a great need of mine: to read data >> directly from google spreadsheets that are private to myself and one or >> two >> collaborators. Thanks to the authors. I had been using RGoogleDocs for the >> about 6 months (maybe more) but have had to stop using it in the past >> month >> since for some reason that I do not understand it no longer reads google >> spreadsheets. I loved it. Its loss depresses me. I started using >> RGoogleData >> which works. >> >> I have noticed that both packages read data slowly. RGoogleData is much >> slower than RGoogleDocs used to be. Both seem a lot slower than if one >> manually downloaded a google spreadsheet as a csv and then used read.csv >> function - but then I would not be able to use scripts and execute without >> finding and futzing. >> >> Can anyone explain in English why these packages read slower than a csv >> download? >> Can anyone explain what the core difference is between the two packages? >> Can anyone share their experience with reading Google data straight into >> R? >> >> Farrel Buchinsky >> Google Voice Tel: (412) 567-7870 >> >> Sent from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States >> >> [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
