[R] xlsReadWrite package repository for Ubuntu

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 3 March 2009 at 07:38, Marc Schwartz wrote:
| You perhaps missed the key point in Uwe's response, which is that the
| package is only available under Windows, as it depends upon Windows
| specific functionality (MS Office API via a third party library which is
| available for Windows only) to natively read and write Excel files.
| Thus, there is no package version available for Linux, or OSX for that
| matter.
| 
| If you need to read Excel files under Linux, you could look at the
| read.xls() function in the 'gdata' CRAN package. This package requires
| that Perl be installed, as it calls a Perl routine (xls2csv) for
| converting the Excel file to a CSV file, which can then be read into R.

Also,   'sudo apt-get install r-cran-gdata'   installs that package on Ubuntu.
The package contains the Perl code.  Years ago, I also added the appropriate
Perl modules to read and write xls files to Debian, these are still available
in Ubuntu so one could write a matching write.xls and contribute it back to
the gdata package.

Finally, note that there is an entire R manual devoted to Data Import questions.

Dirk

-- 
Three out of two people have difficulties with fractions.