[R] Re: Importing Excel .xls into R

[Douglas Bates]

Alexandre Fayolle <Alexandre.Fayolle at logilab.fr> writes:

> On Wed, 6 Dec 2000, Richard A. Bilonick wrote:
> 
> > I don't believe there is any direct way of doing this. 
> 
> Isn't is possible to access an Excell document via ODBC ?

I know you can go the other way and import a table from an ODBC
connection into an Excel spreadsheet.  I did that recently.  

For this kind of exchange Excel is the client on the ODBC connection.
I would be surprised if one were able to transfer data the other way
by making Excel function as an ODBC server. Excel doesn't seem to have
a way of enforcing consistency in the contents of cells in a column
and consistency in columns is important for many other systems that
can use ODBC connections.  In some ways consistent storage and
interpretation for all the elements of a column is the defining
feature of a relational database table.

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