Using R "statistical tool"?????

Why don't you just use the Cocoa (MacOS X-native) version of R? FWIW, .rtf is for word-processing, not data storage. You should save your file as .txt. TextEdit and a myriad of other text editors can do this. Most spreadsheets, including Excel, and graphing/charting applications can also save or export data as tab-delimited, space-delimited, or comma-delimited (aka CSV) text files. Database apps can also do it. The point is that you have a lot of options.

 

The best strategy is to change the Working Directory in R to match the folder that contains your file and then you can just do read.table(filename.txt)

Let me know if you have any further questions, I use R is OS X all the time

 

In R, select Misc->Change Working Directory. (shortcut key cmnd+D)

Then change the working directory to the folder that contains your files.

Now you can use dat<-read.table(filename.txt) without needing a pathname.

Hope this helps

 

you can past the entire path as well

i.e. /Users/blah/blah/yikes.txt

if you use bbedit (or maybe textwrangler can do this?) you can copy the entire path to the clipboard.

you can also use OnMyCommand to add these kinds of options to the right click finder options

http://free.abracode.com/cmworkshop/

technically you can name the file whatever you want - read.table will open your file as a flat file.

i often have crazy names like
proteins.sortd.uniq.data