I am working for a big company with a restrictive internet policy and Excel-addicted colleagues. I am currently working on evolution of market correlations which implies some statistics, data analysis, clustering, data visualization ... From what I have seen on the internet it's not a good idea to do it in Excel. (see here a general study: Excel as a statistics workbench)
After a struggle of 2 weeks, I have finally got from IT a working version of R and some interesting packages. My market data are stocked in a .txt file, I work on it with R and create a results.txt file, then I load the results.txt file in Excel and I plot what my boss wants.
I admit that Excel is useful for manipulating a lot of data sets and graphs at the same place. It's the only good point compared to R for what I want to do. I think my cheap .txt solution to do calculations in R is correct and simple ... (for the anecdote things like Rexcel to connect R and Excel are forbidden where I work - don't ask why - so I have tried a macro which create a .bat to launch R and do the calculation; too complex for my colleagues)
But for data visualization Excel is very poor; I really miss some graphs I have in R. Dendograms, boxplots, histograms, correlation circles, summarized correlations, and heatmaps are very interesting for me, but not available. So my question is how to get them in Excel ? (Remember the strict internet policy; I can't download any add-ins). Is there a (easy) way to plot complex things with macro or workbooks ? Do you have some sources?