We have started working on a new rOpenSci package called writexl. This package wraps the very powerful libxlsxwriter library which allows for exporting data to Microsoft Excel format. The major benefit of writexl over other packages is that it is completely written in C and has absolutely zero dependencies. No Java, Perl or Rtools are required.Getting Started The write_xlsx function writes a data frame to an xlsx file.

The new rOpenSci spelling package provides utilities for spell checking common document formats including latex, markdown, manual pages, and DESCRIPTION files. It also includes tools especially for package authors to automate spell checking of R documentation and vignettes.Spell Checking Packages The main purpose of this package is to quickly find spelling errors in R packages.

Last week we released an update of the tesseract package to CRAN. This package provides R bindings to Google’s OCR library Tesseract.install.packages("tesseract") The new version ships with the latest libtesseract 3.05.01 on Windows and MacOS.

elastic is an R client for Elasticsearch elastic has been around since 2013, with the first commit in November, 2013.What is Elasticsearch? If you aren’t familiar with Elasticsearch, it is a distributed, RESTful search and analytics engine.It’s similar to Solr. It falls in the NoSQL bin of databases, holding data in JSON documents, insteadof rows and columns.

Excited to annonunce a new package called charlatan. While perusingpackages from other programming languages, I saw a neat Python librarycalled faker. charlatan is inspired from and ports many things from Python’shttps://github.com/joke2k/faker library. In turn, faker was inspired fromPHP’s faker,Perl’s Faker, andRuby’s faker. It appears that the PHPlibrary was the original - nice work PHP.Use cases What could you do with this package?

randgeo generates random points and shapes in GeoJSON and WKT formats foruse in examples, teaching, or statistical applications. Points and shapes are generated in the long/lat coordinate system and withappropriate spherical geometry; random points are distributed evenly acrossthe globe, and random shapes are sized according to a maximum great-circledistance from the center of the shape.

I’ve recently released the new package ccafs, which provides accessto data from Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security(CCAFS; http://ccafs-climate.org/) General Circulation Models (GCM) data.GCM’s are a particular type of climate model, used for weather forecasting,and climate change forecasting - read more athttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_circulation_model.

Making packages is a great way to organize R code, whether it’s a set of scripts for personal use, a set of functions for internal company use or a lab group, or to distribute your new cool framework foobar to the masses. There’s a number of guides to writing packages, including http://r-pkgs.had.co.nz/. As you develop packages there’s a number of issues that don’t often get much air time.

A new version of jsonlite package to CRAN. This is a maintenance release with enhancements and bug fixes.

finch has just been released to CRAN (binaries should be up soon). finch is a package to parse Darwin Core files. Darwin Core (DwC) is: GBIF (Global Biodiversity Information Facility) is the biggest holder of biodiversity data.