BERT 2.4.3-r13: a tidier console

BERT 2 built from this fork: works with current R, on a current toolchain, with the console on current Electron, Monaco and xterm. CHANGELOG.md records the changes release by release, and the console shows it under Help ▸ Release Notes.

r13 is look and feel only. Nothing about how R or Excel behave has changed since r12; if you are on r12 and happy with it, there is no hurry.

What you need

• 64-bit Excel (Microsoft 365, or 2016 and later) on Windows 10 1903 or later.
• A 64-bit R from https://cran.r-project.org, anywhere from 3.5 to 4.6. R is not bundled; the installer finds the R you have.

Your R	Functions in cells	Console	Excel references	Graphics	Function help
4.6.x	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes
4.5.x	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes
4.4.x	yes	yes	yes	yes*	yes
4.3.x	yes	yes	yes	yes*	yes
4.2.x	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes
3.5.x	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes

Tested in Excel on 4.6.1, 4.5.2, 4.2.2 and 3.5.0. * 4.3 and 4.4 ship modules built and checked on CI, but are not tested in Excel for want of those R versions on the build machine; they work by the same mechanism as the four that are.

Installing

BERT-Installer-2.4.3-r13-x64.exe: run it with Excel closed. It installs over an existing BERT 2 without touching your bert-config.json, user-stylesheet.less or Documents\BERT2, and picks up the R you already have.

The installer is not code-signed, so Windows SmartScreen will warn on first run ("More info", then "Run anyway").

BERT-2.4.3-r13-x64.zip has the same files for copying by hand, with instructions inside.

What r13 changes

The R shell has a left margin. Text in the shell started hard against the left edge of the pane. It is now inset by a few pixels. The inset is on the scrolling container rather than the terminal itself, because the terminal sizes its columns from that container: inset the terminal instead and it would be wider than the space it sits in, and wide output would pick up a permanent horizontal scrollbar.

The release notes read better. Presentation only, in the console's rendered markdown — these notes and the welcome page. Subheadings were indented further than the text beneath them, so they now share the paragraph indent. A table has no left padding of its own, so its first column started to the left of the surrounding text: it now lines up, with cell padding and a rule under the header row. List items ran together, and now sit a paragraph's space apart.

What came in r12

Complex values reached Excel with only six significant digits. Excel has no complex type, so BERT sends one as text in the a+bi form Excel's own engineering functions read — IMREAL, IMABS and the rest parse it directly. The conversion used default stream formatting, so 314159.2653589793 + 2.718281828459045i arrived as 314159+2.71828i, with no error and no warning. Ordinary doubles were never affected. Complex values now carry 15 significant digits, which is what Excel keeps internally and what R prints.

What came in r11

BERTModule — the compiled R package providing the graphics devices, the xlReference class used for Excel references, and a few helpers — is tied to R's graphics engine version, which changes between R series. r11 ships one module per series, in module/<major>.<minor>; BERT loads the one matching the R it is hosted in, so upgrading R picks up the right module by itself. That is what makes the table above all-yes. The full history is in CHANGELOG.md.

Generated with the assistance of Claude Code.