Folks,

Thanks for your input. I'm pretty comfortable with the options for writing
to .xls; I'm interested in

1. Something that can write to .xlsx for the larger supported dimensions,
as Marc guessed; but of course he's right that .csv would work very well if
that was the main goal.

I'm really looking for

2. something I can use to write a new sheet (and/or columns within existing
sheets) of .xlsx workbooks so I can more easily work with colleagues who're
using those workbooks. It's a bit unwieldy, but they like to use vb, which
its shortcomings I don't have to go into here, and I'd like to get in and
out of their workbooks without all the current cumbersome open -> export as
.csv -> read in -> export as .csv -> copy into workbook.

The other option would be to convert them to using R, but so far no luck
there!

Thanks again

*Ben Caldwell*

PhD Candidate
University of California, Berkeley
130 Mulford Hall #3114
Berkeley, CA 94720
Office 223 Mulford Hall
(510)859-3358


On Wed, Jan 9, 2013 at 2:03 PM, Marc Schwartz <marc_schwartz@me.com> wrote:

>
> On Jan 9, 2013, at 2:45 PM, Gabor Grothendieck <ggrothendieck@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > On Wed, Jan 9, 2013 at 2:19 PM, Benjamin Caldwell
> > <btcaldwell@berkeley.edu> wrote:
> >> Dear r helpers;
> >>
> >> I'm interested in reading from and writing to large .xlsx files fairly
> >> regularly.  (Why, the naysayers may ask - and the answer is basically
> >> colleagues and clients who prefer that format). I've tried out the
> >> XLConnect and xlsx libraries, but the java implementation they use just
> >> takes too much RAM for the files I'm working with.
> >>
> >> gdata leverages perl and works really well for reading in those files,
> so
> >> half the problem is solved for me! I don't see anything in the
> >> documentation about writing .xlsx, though. Is anyone aware of any
> libraries
> >> or clever solutions in R that would get the job done for me? I see a
> couple
> >> packages on CPAN for writing an xlsx, so it's been done in perl;
> perhaps it
> >> would be easy to run that from R? I don't use perl myself (yet?).
> >>
> >> Looking for recommendations.
> >>
> >> Best
> >>
> >> Ben Caldwell
> >
> > Check out
> > http://rwiki.sciviews.org/doku.php?id=tips:data-io:ms_windows&s=excel
> > and in particular the WriteXLS package can write Excel 2003 files
> > (xls) using perl.
> >
>
> Thanks for the referral Gabor.
>
> If Benjamin needs the xlsx format due to the larger dimensions supported,
> WriteXLS, since it writes xls format files, would not likely be suitable.
> Otherwise, of course, current versions of Excel can open the older format.
>
> If Benjamin simply needs to dump larger (for some definition of larger)
> datasets externally in format that is compatible with Excel, he could write
> out CSV files that, of course, can then be opened in Excel. That presumes
> that he is not looking to do any other formatting of the worksheets or
> other similar functionality that is native to Excel.
>
> Regards,
>
> Marc Schwartz
>
>

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