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

[Gabor Grothendieck]

1. read.xls in gdata has the capability of

- reading an xls file starting from the first row with a given pattern
- converting an xls file to a csv file
- converting an xls file to a data frame

Would those capabilities be sufficient for the input side?  See
examples in ?read.xls

2. If you do a google search for:  r-wiki excel
and click on Cache for the first one (since the web site sems down at
the moment) you can get some tips on using R with Excel.


On Wed, Jan 20, 2010 at 2:57 PM, Jerry Floren <jerry.floren at state.mn.us> wrote:
>
> 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
>
>
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