[R] Re: Importing Excel .xls into R

[Prof Brian D Ripley]

On 6 Dec 2000, Douglas Bates wrote:

> 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.

Doug's caveats are right, but Excel *is* an ODBC server, and I have
actually imported from Excel into R using RODBC.  The naming
conventions were a nightmare, though.

ODBC is not just about relational databases, in that ODBC bridges can make
other systems look like relational databases, even text files (which cna be
useful if they are compressed).

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

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