[R] Yet another question about importing Excel *.xls files

[Jerry Floren]

Six times a year labs submit individual Excel spreadsheets to me. There are
usually around 60 labs and the spreadsheets have 12 columns with 20 rows. 

Chapter 8 of the R Data Import/Export manual recommends converting .xls
files, to a text file. I have been manually converting the individual .xls
files submitted by the 60 labs to a single .csv file. 

There are several steps in the process. First I have to open the raw file,
then copy and paste it into another .xls file and save the second file. This
second file has an additional page that formats the lab submitted data into
rows and columns that can be used by R. Finally, I copy the formatted page
into another Excel spreadsheet that is saved as a .csv file. This file
contains all the data submitted by the labs.

This takes about a day, but my main concern is the chance for errors. I have
to make sure I do not omit a lab, enter the same lab data twice, or
accidentally paste over some existing data.

It looks like odbcConnectExcel in the package RODBC can select rows and
columns from individual spreadsheets. Is it possible to use this on multiple
(60) spreadsheets and have a single spreadsheet automatically generated? If
so, could you please share some tips and examples to get me started.

Thanks,

Jerry Floren
Minnesota Department of Agriculture


-- 
View this message in context: http://n4.nabble.com/Yet-another-question-about-importing-Excel-xls-files-tp1018699p1018699.html
Sent from the R help mailing list archive at Nabble.com.