My work team has been exploring ways to produce a solution that would allow Excel users to call R functions in Excel. The tool has to meet several criteria, including:
- be robust, stable and user-friendly,
- should require little maintenance,
- should not depend on unreliable third-party providers and
- show good performance (e.g., passing a matrix of 5000 * 365 elements from Excel to R and returning such a matrix from R to Excel with little latency).
After extensive research and several trials, we have not found a solution that meets these criteria.
We tried these ready solutions:
- RExcel: Main limitation: not supported anymore
- BERT: https://bert-toolkit.com/. Main limitation: not supported anymore.
We also tried building our own solution with these tools:
- Microsoft.R.Host.Client.API: DataTechNotes: How to Run R Script from C# Program in a Session. Main limitation: draft work and not supported anymore
- Building our own add-in using .NET framework 4.6.1, ExcelDna.AddIn and ExcelDna.Integration. Main limitation: instability
- Calling R functions using JSON objects. Main limitation: not user-friendly and poor performance.
What viable solutions for calling R functions in Excel are available apart from those aforementioned?