4.4 Read data files from other statistical tools - Video Tutorials & Practice Problems

<v Voiceover>While in an ideal</v> world you would never need to use any other statistical package other than R, the truth of the matter is sometimes your data is trapped in a proprietary format from some other tool. Fortunately, there is the foreign package to help retrieve some of that data. To load it up, we do require(foreign). And this exposes a number of functions. For instance, let's say you're using SPSS. You could do read.spss and point it towards the SPSS file and you can grab your data. For Stata, you can use read.dta. For SASS, you can use read.ssd. Now, the thing with SASS is that if you want to open a SASS file using read.ssd, you need to actually have a valid SASS license. That is the one hiccup with this function. One workaround for this is if you're using Revolution R, you can open SASS data without having a SASS license using the special function, RX SASS data. If your data's stuck in Octave, you could do read.octave. Minitab is read.mtp, and Systat is read.systat. These functions should be very helpful in getting all of your data out of your other packages.