[R] Excel to R

[Duncan Temple Lang]

Indeed, keeping the computations in R and working directly with the
Excel view of the cells is desirable for generality. It minimizes the
loss in information from translating to simpler forms such as CSV,
strings, etc.

>From within R on Windows, one can use DCOM to create an Excel
application, load the file and then read each of the worksheets in the
workbook cell by cell and obtain all sorts of information about each
cell.

The RDCOMClient package on the Omegahat Web site
(http://www.omegahat.org/RDCOMClient) and Thomas Baier's rcom package
provide the DCOM facilities from R.  David James has already done some
work to process Excel Worksheet and Range objects using the
RDCOMClient and create R data frames. And there is C code in the GGobi
distribution which does something very similar.

 D.

Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
> 
> 
> I have Excel files containing data that I would like to move to R.
> They are in the standard form of a one row header followed by 
> rows of data, one record per row EXCEPT that there are a few
> rows of comments before the header.  The number of rows of comments
> varies.  For Excel files of this form without comments I have had
> success with:
> 
> require(RODBC)
> z <- odbcConnectExcel("C:/myspread.xls")
> z.df <- sqlFetch(z,"Sheet1")
> close(z)
> 
> but the comments interfere with this.  
> 
> I don't want to manually delete the rows but want the entire
> process from Excel file to R to be automatic.
> 
> I can accomplish this with a free utility, Baird's dataload that 
> I found on the net.  This will convert the Excel files to text 
> and then the text can be processed using R to locate the start of 
> the header and only process the remainder of the file.  (There is
> also another free utility called xlhtml that I don't use, but could 
> have, that does this too.) Thus at this point I have an 
> adequate automated solution.
> 
> Nevertheless, I was wondering, for sake of interest, if there is 
> some solution in R that does not involve such an external program
> such as dataload or xlhtml.
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> (I am using Windows 2000.)
> 
> _______________________________________________
> No banners. No pop-ups. No kidding.
> Introducing My Way - http://www.myway.com
> 
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list
> https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help

-- 
_______________________________________________________________

Duncan Temple Lang                duncan at research.bell-labs.com
Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies    office: (908)582-3217
700 Mountain Avenue, Room 2C-259  fax:    (908)582-3340
Murray Hill, NJ  07974-2070       
         http://cm.bell-labs.com/stat/duncan