[R] How to read an excel data into R?

[Spencer Graves]

	  'RSiteSearch' is an R command new with R 2.0.0 or 2.1.0, I believe. 
It essentially passes the argument string to "www.r-project.org" -> 
Search -> "R site search".  Consequently, it requires internet access to 
work.  When I have an R (or S-Plus) question for which I do not already 
know where to find the answer, "R site search" has been my primary 
search tool for some time.

	  spencer graves

Ling Jin wrote:
 > Could you be more specific about RSiteSearch("read excel")? I think it
 > must be useful.
 >
################################
	  Your error message tells me that you have different numbers of fields
in different lines.  You say you, "copied and pasted the excel data into
a txt file".  I usually copy what I want into a clean sheet then File ->
Save, then File -> "Save As" -> "Save as type" = "CSV (Comma delimited)
(*.csv)" or "Text (Tab delimited) (*.txt)".  Excel will ask if I'm sure
a couple of times, and I say yes.  If that's what you've done and still
have a problem, then I have other tools:

	  First, I'll assign the file name to something like "File".  Then,
'readLines(File, n=9)' tells me if the file starts as I think it does.
If I've got extra headers, it will tell me that.

	  Then, I do something like the following:

	  n.flds <- count.fields(File, sep="\t")
	  plot(n.flds)
	  sd(n.flds)

	  Then I play with the arguments to "count.fields" until 'sd(n.flds)'
is 0.  Then I use "read.table" with arguments as I used to get
everything right in 'count.fields'.  If I can't get sd(n.flds) to 0, you
can try read.table with 'fill=TRUE'.  However, when you do that, you
need to check to make sure all the columns line up correctly with the
shorter lines.

	  Also, this issue has been discussed many times.  'RSiteSearch("read
excel")' just produced 1196 hits for me.  If the above doesn't work, you
might try skimming a few from that list.

	  hope this helps.
	  spencer graves

Ling Jin wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> Does anybody know the easiest way to import excel data into R? I copied 
> and pasted the excel data into a txt file, and tried read.table, but R 
> reported that
> 
> Error in read.table("data_support.txt", sep = " ", header = T) :
>          more columns than column names
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> Ling
> 
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