Clippy: really?!?

[msberends]

Please, PLEASE remove clippy from the man pages. It's really annoying and improves nothing.

Thanks! 😄

[jeroen]

Improving nothing? He is helping, he even says so.

[msberends]

Right. But there’re dozens of other R users using your package and they are (for a reason) used to how R works and how the help pages of packages work. I’ve never seen anything like this before. It’s a funny feature, but I really think you should comply to the developer guidelines in the CRAN developers policy. It’s now impossible to read the text underneath Clippy, so you first need to move your pointer. Quite annoying to say the least, I would say.

If Clippy is needed, you didn’t write the manual very well I’m afraid...

[msberends]

I see that you’re already on CRAN, so I think they have missed it 😉
Maybe did the review in a base R and not RStudio for example.

[gksmyth]

Jereon, thanks for creating the writexl package but, honestly, Clippy seems a silly indulgence. Clippy was annoying when Microsoft introduced it >20 years ago, and it's still annoying now. As Wikipedia says, "The program was widely reviled among users as intrusive and annoying, and was criticized even within Microsoft." It was considered too intrusive even by Microsoft's standards and was dropped pretty quickly.

I guess you already know all the above, and the insertion of clippy into an R help file is just to be funny / show off / demonstrate it can be done. It is at users' expense however, so it seems a strange priority. Is writexl not intended for serious use?

[EarlGlynn]

I nearly freaked out when I saw clippy -- deja vu Office 97. It is annoying, but I just wanted to make sure it wasn't some sort of malware in RStudio. But seriously, thanks for writexl.

I normally would save to CSV files, instead of Excel, but the default flaw in Excel is to read ICD 9 codes such as 12, 12.0 and 12.00 in a CSV as the same thing. Writing them into Excel maintains correctness of the codes as strings.

[warnes]

Clippy is annoying, and I just wasted 30 minutes looking for a way to turn this off through MS-Windows configuration because I assumed that MS-Windows was the source of this. Please turn it off.

As a side note, using the Clippy image in this way is likely to be a trademark violation, and may land you in legal trouble if Microsoft becomes aware of it.

[msberends]

Today I got to read the help page again and I am done with this nonsense.

I've sent an email to Dr Uwe Ligges, CRAN package maintainer and statistician at the Dortmund University. I really hope they reconsider the availability of this package on CRAN and force you to upload it again without Clippy.

Please think primarily about users and not about yourself. As you can read above, people think it is malware or a Microsoft glitch. It's childish to keep it, and I can only hope Ligges thinks so too.
I'm sorry, I'm not easily frustrated. But this how-low-can-you-go contest is over for me.