Ian fellows, a hard working contributer to the R community (and a cool guy), has announced today the release of Deducer (0.4) to CRAN (scheduled to update in the next day or so).

This major update also includes the release of a new plug-in package (DeducerExtras), containing additional dialogs and functionality.

Following is the e-mail he sent out with all the details and demo videos.

Deducer

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).

For those not familiar with Deducer, an online manual is available at: http://www.deducer.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Main.DeducerManual

An introductory tour of Deducer (4.5 min):

There is also an “expert users introsuction” (8 min)

ggplot2 Plot Builder

The major change to Deducer is the inclusion of a new plotting GUI built on the ggplot2 package. This Google Summer of Code project provides an easy to use system to make anything from simple histograms, to custom publication ready graphics. Feel free to check out the video introduction:

Part 1 (6 min):

Part 2 (6 min):

Additional videos:

Templates (5 min):

Extending the Builder (4 min):

Deducer Extras

The DeducerExtras package is an add-on package containing a variety of additional analysis dialogs. These include:

Distribution quantiles

Single/multiple sample proportion tests

Paired t-test, and wilcoxon signed rank test

Levene’s test and bartlett’s test

K-means clustering

Hierarchical clustering

Factor analysis

Multi-dimensional scaling

Introduction to Deducer Extras (~2 min):

Final thanks

I would like to take this opportunity to thank the R community for choosing this project for a Google Summer of Code grant, and for the support and encouragement. In particular I would like to thank Hadley Wickham for mentoring the Plot Builder GUI, and Dirk Eddelbuettel for his organization of students and mentors.