How can Sweave users collaborate with Word users?

calendar_today Asked May 16, 2012
thumb_up 7 upvotes
history Updated April 16, 2026

Question posted 2012 · +17 upvotes

I’d like to pitch the question discussed here to the SO community: what is the best way for Sweave users to collaborate with Word users?

I’m trying to move my entire workflow to R and Sweave (or similar, e.g. maybe Knitr will prove more useful). However, the last step in my workflow is usually to write a manuscript with collaborators. They work by passing MS Word documents back and forth, and editing text using Track Changes.

Let’s stipulate that I can’t convince any of them to learn any new software – their process isn’t going to change. I am looking for a straightforward way to:

1.) send Sweave-created documents to coauthors

2.) allow them to open the documents in Word and make tracked changes

3.) receive the edited documents and reincorporate them into Sweave, ideally with co-authors’ changes highlighted in some way

4.) And if the solution works for OSX, that would be great.

The discussion on the R help mailing list focusses on SWord which appears to be undocumented and available only for Windows. Does anyone know if it is good? The discussion on Vanderbilt’s biostatistics wiki is good on ways to get Sweave documents into Word-readable forms, but no so much on how to integrate edited Word documents with Sweave.

Accepted answer +7 upvotes

I use a combination of approaches, depending on who is editing. My default is to have editors / collaborators markup a PDF or hard copy. Foxit Reader is free and provides more extensive PDF commenting tools than Acrobat reader, although reader allows comment bubbles.

For more extensive contributions, it helps that I separate out the Sweave parts of a document from the main text, e.g. by writing results in results.Rnw and the inserting input{results.tex} into the main document. This allows you to send around the part that does not include the R markup. You can also copy-paste everything between the preamble and bibliography into a word document, and ask users to ignore the markup. If you copy-paste from an editor with syntax highlighting, it can be copied to word, making the process easier.

You might also consider using Inference for R, which is like Sweave for Word. There is also Lyx, which requires users to learn a new program, but which is easier to use than Sweave.

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