Hello folks,
Has anyone experimented with R for analysis? If you have, I've love to chat about your experience and use cases.
Have a super day,
John
Like Samantha, it's on my list. I've played around with it a little bit but so far only with sample data. I have yet to try to connect it to SQL Server. Definitely interested in hearing more.
Do you have any examples of the types of analysis you've like to do? Even high-level examples are helpful.
I'm mostly interested in visualizations that go beyond what's currently possible/easy with T-Stats and Excel. When looking at our Major Gifts program in particular, things like average gift size don't tell a useful story because the tiny handful of very large gifts you get (or don't get) in a year really skew the numbers. I've put a lot of time and effort into creating box plots, for example, (something that Excel doesn't do natively, though you can hack a stacked column chart toward the same end.) Sometimes I get to a finished result and then we think it might be interesting to look at a slightly different iteration, and that process eats up so much time. I expect that if I invested the time into learning how to do this in R, it could be a simpler process. Maybe.
I'd also like to see dynamically updating charts--campaign revenue over time vs prior years, for example. We currently have fairly intricate Excel charts that are hand-updated weekly, which obviously makes them vulnerable to data entry errors, not to mention the time we could save if they were automated. I explored ways of doing this with Tableau, but the cost is prohibitive for the use cases I've come up with so far. I've played with accomplishing this in SSRS too, but it is currently way down my list of priorities...!