A year ago we blogged about Ian Fellows’s R Gui called Deducer (oops, my bad, I meant to link to this).

Fellows sends in this update:

Since version 0.1, I [Fellows] have added:

1. A nice plug-in interface, so that people can extend Deducer’s capability without leaving the comfort of R. (see: http://www.deducer.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Main.Development )

2. Several new dialogs.

3. A one-step installer for windows.

4. A plug-in package (DeducerExtras) which extends the scope of analyses covered.

5. A plotting GUI that can create anything from simple histograms to complex custom graphics.

Deducer is designed to be a free easy to use alternative to proprietary data analysis software such as SPSS, JMP, and Minitab. It has a menu system to do common data manipulation and analysis tasks, and an excel-like spreadsheet in which to view and edit data frames. The goal of the project is two fold.

Provide an intuitive interface so that non-technical users can learn and perform analyses without programming getting in their way.

Increase the efficiency of expert R users when performing common tasks by replacing hundreds of keystrokes with a few mouse clicks. Also, as much as possible the GUI should not get in their way if they just want to do some programming.

Deducer is designed to be used with the Java based R console JGR, though it supports a number of other R environments (e.g. Windows RGUI and RTerm).

I haven’t tried it myself but it sounds like a good idea.