UK house prices visualised with googleVis-0.2.16

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A new version of googleVis has been released on CRAN and the project site. Version 0.2.16 adds the functionality to plot quarterly and monthly data as a motion chart.

To illustrate the new feature I looked for a quarterly data set and stumbled across the quarterly UK house price data published by Nationwide, a building society. The data is available in a spread sheet format and presents the average house prices and indexed to 100 in Q1 1993 by region in the UK from Q4 1973 to Q1 2012. Unfortunately the data is formated for human eyes rather than for computers, see the screen shot below.

Screen shot of Nationwide's UK house price data in Excel
Never-mind, the XLConnect package by Mirai Solutions does a fabulous job in reading Excel files into R. An advantage of XLConnect, compared to other packages, is that it also works on a Mac, although I had to install the package from source (install.packages("XLConnect", type="source")).

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