[R] excel files and R

[Fan]

For loading Excel data and many others file formats,
one possibility is to use the free conversion utility: DataLoad.

See: http://www.vsn-intl.com/genstat/downloads/datald.htm
(there're probably also other links)

It should be easy to create R wrappers to use that utility.

Cheers
--
Fan

Marc Schwartz wrote:
> On Wed, 2003-06-25 at 09:20, Thomas Lumley wrote:
> 
>>On Wed, 25 Jun 2003, Simon Fear wrote:
>>
>>
>>>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.
>>>
>>
>>It would be nice, but it's quite hard to read Excel off Windows.
>>
>>The formats in foreign are either documented by the vendor (accurately in
>>the case of Stata and Epi Info, with some omissions for SAS XPORT) or that
>>have been reverse-engineered by someone else (read.spss is based on
>>PSPP, an attempt at an SPSS clone by Ben Pfaaf, and I think Duncan
>>Murdoch did read.S).
>>
>>
>>While it isn't usual to say nice things about commercial vendors on these
>>lists I would like to note that Stata not only documents its file format
>>in its manuals (with some helpful C snippets for the trickier parts), but
>>made available the file format for their `large data set' version 7/SE,
>>which I didn't buy.
>>
>>
>>	-thomas
> 
> 
> 
> Simon,
> 
> To add to Thomas' comments and respond to your thoughts, if one were so
> inclined, given that R is a volunteer effort, I suspect that an addition
> to 'foreign' for Excel would indeed be appreciated by many users.
> 
> One resource, with appropriate attribution given, would be the source
> code for OpenOffice.org's (OOo) Calc. Since Calc can read and write
> Excel formats without using Windows/Office DLL's, it seems reasonable to
> presume that OOo has reverse engineered the native Excel file structure.
> Since OOo's source is available under the GPL, this could provide the
> basis for a "read.excel" function.
> 
> Yet another would be Gnumeric, which like Calc is GPL'd and can read and
> write native Excel file formats.
> 
> More information is available at:
> 
> http://www.openoffice.org/dev_docs/source/1.0.3/source.html
> 
> http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric/
> 
> 
> Food for thought...   :-)
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Marc Schwartz
> 
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