What's a robust method in R for importing from and exporting data to Excel?

Question

I've used RODBC for some time to import Excel spreadsheets with mostly good results. However I have had no luck writing to an Excel spreadsheet. Also are there favorable differences using the xlsx format with Excel2007?

Balsamiferous

Answer 1

I've used the technique described here: Export Data Frames To Multi-worksheet Excel File

Tubing

Answer 2

The R Data Import/Export manual should be considered the best source of advice for these questions.

For reading you can indeed use the RODBC package. An easier solutoion may be read.xls() from the gdata

For writing you can use one of the wrapper packages such as WriteXLS which wraps around Perl libraries that know how to write in the proprietary and not formally documented xls format.

In general, xlsx will not be a solution as this format is newer, once again proprietary and not documented. For that reason there are even fewer tools coping with this.

Haim

xlsx is an open format (though probably complicated) msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd922181.aspx You can actually unzip an xlsx file and view the xml. I expect this will result eventually in a good read/write solution. – Balsamiferous

I see. Well, so you have the need for a new write.xlsx() function, and the know-how. So go off now and scratch that itch :) – Haim

The manual leaves out something pretty important: #6099743 – Leucotomy

Answer 3

XLConnect works well. It is cross-platform. It can read and write xls and xlsx files. See this previous answer

Therapeutic

Answer 4

This question is 3 years old, but I'll throw this in: if you want to write to the spreadsheet, remember to add readOnly=FALSE as an argument to odbcConnectExcel and odbcConnectExcel2007.

Uncanonical

Answer 5

There is a package that may help with dealing with excel 2007, but I haven't tried it.

http://www.omegahat.org/RExcelXML/

Boast