R with RKWard is quite awesome.
I have used it daily since 2006. Here's video on installing RKWard on windows
>is there a way I can highlight a section of it to modify/delete?
No.
But if you are on windows I believe there is a built in text editor of sorts. Regardless get Rstudio, just install and start it and you have a fullblown editor that communicates automatically with R, one caveat: the grid-like view of your data does not support editing. (if you're a little more courageous there is the more advanced rkward)
>For my main question: I'm working with a time-series dataset
I don't know much about time-series but as far as I know R has special data types for time-series, do a
apropos('ts')
and see if something familiar comes up.
There are some GUIs designed to make the R experience more palatable for first-time users. A few are Deducer, R Commander, and Rkward. I'm not sure how well any of them will work with Mountain Lion though.
Ok, here's the thing: it's really made as a two tier solution with one part being a point-and-click plugin to RKWard (native linux but can be made to run on windows) and the other part the R package which does the actual work. Only the R package is availabe right now and it's not so well documented. Also input sanitisation is done in the gui, which makes the R-functions somewhat unfriendly.
An early version of the package can be downloaded here.
Minimally it should be enough to just do:
cphsoc_convert_from_spss(<path to spss file>)
This should produce a csv-file, a do-file (for import into stata), an .RData-file (the dataset in R format) and a html table of variable names and labels in the same folder and with the same name as the original file.
The parameters
out_dirname out_filename
can be used to direct output to another folder/another name than the input file.
The encoding parameters
source_enc target_enc
may be relevant when in a non ascii locale as this can trigger all kinds of oddities.
I you are on linux or if you feel like installing KDE in windows you can use rkward which is the most advanced gui for R, menues and all. It also supports plugins and custom menus.