[R] Reading data from xls..........please help

[Katya Mauff]

Surely you could also save the excel spreadsheet with the relevant data as a text file, and then read it into R as normal?
Select "save as" in Excel and then change "save as type" to "Text (Tab delimited)(*.txt)". 
 
Save it in the directory you are using in R, (or change the directory in R to where you would like to keep your data), and then use the read.table statement for the text version of the file. Just ensure that you do not have spaces between words in each cell, so e.g. if you have a column named "variable type", change it to "variable_type"-otherwise you'll get an error when you try to read it into R. You might also find it useful to change any missing (empty) cells in Excel to "NA" before reading it in.
 
 


>>> Petr PIKAL <petr.pikal at precheza.cz> 2010/06/18 01:42 PM >>>
Hi

r-help-bounces at r-project.org napsal dne 16.06.2010 22:14:33:

> Thanks for your reply. Possibly I donot have perl. I am not sure 
although.
> How I can find whether I have it? If I dont have it then where can I
> download it from?

Do you have Excel? If yes you can

Open Excel
Select data you want to transfer to R
Press 

Ctrl-C 

to copy it to clipboard
Open R and write 

mydata <- read.delim("clipboard")

to console.

Regards
Petr


> 
> 
> On Thu, Jun 17, 2010 at 12:57 AM, Barry Rowlingson <
> b.rowlingson at lancaster.ac.uk> wrote:
> 
> > On Wed, Jun 16, 2010 at 7:29 PM, Christofer Bogaso
> > <bogaso.christofer at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > Can anyone help me how to read xls file into R. I have tried 
following
> > >
> > > library(gdata)
> > > xlsfile <- file.path(.path.package('gdata'),'xls','iris.xls')
> > > read.xls(xlsfile)
> > >
> > > I got following error:
> > > Converting xls file to csv file... Error in system(cmd, intern =
> > !verbose) :
> > > perl not found
> > > Error in file.exists(tfn) : invalid 'file' argument
> > >
> > > Question *1) What is the way to get it working?*
> >
> >  Works for me on an Ubuntu 9.10 with R 2.10.1, so swapping your OS and
> > R version to that will get it working... What OS/R are you on?
> >
> >  Note it says 'perl not found'. That's because it hasn't found perl.
> > Do you have perl on your system? Do you need to specify the path to
> > perl, as in the examples for Windows in help(read.xls)?
> >
> > Barry
> >
> 
>    [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
> 
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