As I said in my last post,

googleformr came out of a persistent series of questions: How to collect data remotely? And do it programmatically with R? And safely, easily, and free?

Well, now googleformr is up on CRAN.

Google Form niceties

After getting googleformr on CRAN, I had intended to extend googleformr with some data visualization functionality in future revisions; but upon consideration I’ve realized that Google Form has some built in point-n-click summary tools that are quite robust.

For example, if you simply go to your Google Form spreadsheet, you can click the “Show summary of responses” on the Form drop-down tab, an html report with text, timeline, and bar chart features.

Moreover, with Google’s deployment of the Automatic Statistician in Spreadsheets, lower-level descriptive tasks are coming for free. So I don’t feel the pressure to build out those features.

googleformr is an app

One of the more interesting developments since releasing googleformr has been the realization that it could help me solve other problems in ways I hadn’t imagined before. So with those googleformr functionalities less of an need because of what Google Forms offers out of the box, in the near future I hope to focus more on expanding ways that googleformr can be leveraged elsewhere.

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