read.xls {xlsReadWrite}R Documentation

Data Input

Description

Natively reads an Excelsheet and creates a data.frame or a matrix from it. The supported format is BIFF8, i.e. Excel v97-2003.

Usage

read.xls( file, colNames = TRUE, sheet = 1, type = "data.frame", from = 1 )

Arguments

file the name of the file to read from.
colNames indicates if there is a header row in Excel. Either a logical value or a character vector with user defined column names.
sheet to read from. Either a number (starting from 1) or a character string naming the sheet.
type specifies the type of the return value. Either data.frame or the entries double, integer, logical or character which give back a matrix.
from specifies the first row to start reading. Depending on the value of colNames this is the header row or the first data row. (Slightly different from the pro version where the upper left corner (row/col) can be indicated).

Details

For data.frames there is an auto-row feature. Provided the following two conditions are met, a column is taken as the rownames: 1) colNames is TRUE or has values where the first entry is empty and 2) in the Excel table the first entry of the header is empty.

Value

A data.frama or a matrix containing the data.

Pro version

Besides the free open source version there is a shareware version which is formally supported and offers some more features, e.g.:xls.sheet: insert, delete, rename and select sheets, directly address sectors (columns, rows or cells) in Excel, xls.open and xls.close keep the connection in memory and avoid the overhead to re-read the whole file for subsequent actions. colClasses supports classes and rownames.

Why not check out xlsReadWritePro? It's free to try and - besides donations (hint, hint...) - also a good way to support my work. Infos, updates, bugfixes etc, see: http://treetron.googlepages.com

Author(s)

Hans-Peter Suter

See Also

write.xls, read.table, matrix, data.frame


[Package xlsReadWrite version 1.0 Index]