R becomes a critical tool in government departments

Situation and Outlook for Primary Industries (2012) just published by New Zealand’s Ministry for Primary Industries (click to download page) demonstrates well that R is a limitless tool for analysis and graphing, and the capability of using R is growing in government departments.

Special thanks to Andy South, whose rworldmap package enables an easy and systematic way to create map-pie charts. Also, Joris Meys’ solution helps to adjust an Atlantic-centered map to Pacific centered map (It would be nice if rworldmap package has Pacific-centered map as an alternative). R AnalyticFlow is one of the handiest GUI for R.

Derek McCrae Norton’s presentation in the 2011 useR conference gives an extremely effective way to marketing R in big organizations with long histories. If you would like to build up the presence of R in your organization, please read and follow Derek’s advice.

The extra surprise is that our publication team absolutely loves graphs (.eps) produced by R. The reason is simple — they do not need to do anything apart from adjusting graph positions. What they used to do with M$ excel graphs is very onerous — change all color themes, s and axis. Of course, this process will come back and forward several times. With R, once these cosmetic things are fixed, what’s left is just mass productions.