[R] excel files and R

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Wed, 25 Jun 2003, Simon Fear wrote:

> Many many thanks. I did look at this but I have absolutely no idea of
> the
> background so got completely lost. Can you recommend a gentle
> introduction/overview to this area, based on the assumption that my
> current
> knowledge equals zero? Indeed, could you make an argument that I should
> ever
> *want* to run R from within Excel or vice versa? I think I just want to
> get
> the data from Excel ('cos that's how it nearly always comes), but I
> don't
> want to process it in Excel, when I have R ...
> 
> I guess all that I and apparently others really want is that "foreign"
> might
> include read.excel, like it has read.sas and read.spss. Which is
> essentially
> what Bernhard Pfaff's recent post offers - thanks again Bernhard - but
> using
> RODBC instead of foreign.

The Excel .xls format is poorly documented, probably deliberately
obfuscated.  A direct interface is on the TODO list: it should be quite
easy in Windows and possible in other OSes (there is code in Gnumeric, for
example).  In any case, this is a lot harder than the interfaces currently 
in foreign.

-- 
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 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595