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memisc 0.99 published on CRAN

18 January 2016

A new version 0.99 of package memisc has been published on CRAN, which adds a few new features to the previously published version.

One highlight of the new release is the support for output into HTML. Since contemporary word processors can read HTML, it is now much easier to get nicely formatted mtable output in “Word” or “LibreOffice”. Another highlight is the ability to create complex tables by putting together other tables.

An example of a complex table created by putting together constituent tables

Changes since 0.97

New features

• Support for exporting results of various functions into HTML format is now supported by the function format_html. This should make it easier to import them into HTML or word-processing documents (that support importing HTML). A preview of the HTML is made available by the new (generic) function show_html.

  In particular, results of the functions mtable (i.e. tables of model estimates), ftable (i.e. flattened contingency tables etc.), and codebooks, can be exported int. HTML using format_html. Also data frames can be exported into HTML.

• A function dsView is added, which allows a display of data.set objects similar as View displays data frames.

• mtable now handles multi-equation models better, in particular if the model objects supplied as arguments vary in the number and/or names of the equations. There is also a new option to place confidence intervals to the right of coefficient estimates. Further mtable gains the following optional aguments:

  • show.baselevel, which allows to suppress the display of baseline categories of dummy variables, when dummy variable coefficients are displayed
  • sdigits, to specify the number of digits of summary statistics.
  • gs.options, to pass optional arguments to getSummary, allowin for more flexibility in creating tables.

  One can now use a summaryTemplate generic function for formatting model summaries, in addition to set the template by setSummaryTemplate. Finally, parts of “mtables” can be extracted using the [ operator as with matrices, and “mtables” can now also be concatenated.

• There is now an object class for survey items containing dates, called "datetime.item"
• There is a new function wild.codes to check wild codes (i.e. unlabelled codes of an otherwise labelled item.)
• codebook now supports data frames, factors, and numeric vectors.
• A toLatex method exists now for data.set objects.
• A new percentages function is added to allow easy creation of tables of percentages.
• Support for with model groups in mtable. c.mtable now creates groups of models, if arguments are tagged.
• Flattened contingency tables (ftables as they are created by the eponymous function in the stats package) can now be combined into ftable_matrix objects. This can be done by using rbind() or cbind().

Bugfixes

• spss.fixed.file is now able to handle labelled strings and value labels and missing values statements.
• Internal C-code used by spss.fixed.file no longer assumed that arguments are copied – some strange behaviour of objects created by spss.fixed.file is now corrected.
• Description of items in external data sources is more complete now - the same information as for items in internal data.sets.
• applyTemplate now returns empty strings for undefined quantities.
• collect method for data.sets now works as expected.
• spss.fixed.file now checks whether there are undefined variables in varlab.file etc.
• Stata.file now can import Stata 9 and Stata 10 files.
• str and ls.str are imported from the utils package to prevent a NOTE in R CMD check

User-visible changes

• Argument drop is no longer used by function mtable.
• All vignettes now use knitr.
• Format of file produced by write.mtable can now be specified using a format= argument. But forLaTeX=TRUE still can be used to get LaTeX files.

Defunct

• The functions Termplot, Simulate, and panel.errbars are defunct. Graphics similar to those built with panel.errbars can be created with facilities provided by the package “mplot”, which is currently available on GitHub.
• The function UnZip has been removed from the package. unzip in conjunction with system.file does the same job, as can be seen in the example for spss.portable.file.