read.xls {xlsReadWrite}R Documentation

Read Excelfiles

Description

Reads an Excelsheet and returns a data.frame or a matrix. Supported is the native BIFF8 file format, i.e. Excel 97-2003.

Usage

read.xls( file, 
          colNames = TRUE, 
          sheet = 1, 
          type = "data.frame",
          from = 1, 
          rowNames = NA, colClasses = NA, checkNames = TRUE, 
          dateTimeAs = "numeric", 
          stringsAsFactors = default.stringsAsFactors() )

Arguments

file the name of a file. If it does not contain an absolute path, the file name is relative to the current working directory.
colNames a character vector or a logical. TRUE takes a title row from the spreadsheet. The default is "V" followed by the column number.
sheet to read from. A case sensitive character string or a number.
type the type of the returned value. Either data.frame or - for matrices - double, integer, logical or character.
from the starting row to read from.
rowNames a character vector with the actual row names or TRUE to use the first Excel column.
With NA the first column will be considered to contain row names under two conditions: 1) colNames is TRUE or contains a character vector and 2) the first column name thereof is an empty string.
colClasses the class of the data.frame columns. Possible entries are: double, numeric, integer, logical, character, factor, NA, isodate, isotime and isodatetime. A scalar entry will be recycled if necessary.
isodate retrieves a "YYYY-MM-DD", isotime a "hh:mm:ss" and isodatetime a "YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss" character string.
With NA a suitable column type will be determined based on the first non-empty entry of the first 16 rows of the Excelsheet.
checkNames with TRUE the colNames are guaranteed to be syntactically valid variable names (by make.names).
dateTimeAs controls how to determine a column class for columns which are formatted as date, time or datetime. Possible entries are: numeric or isodatetime. Will be overruled by explicit colClasses arguments.
stringsAsFactors set to FALSE to retrieve plain characters. The default follows the global option default.stringsAsFactors().

Details

The arguments colNames and/or colClasses can optionally include an entry for the rownames column (which will be discarded).

Value

A data.frame or a matrix of the specified type.

Pro version

While the free version should be sufficient for most day-to-day duties, you have the opportunity to choose a more powerful pro version and at the same time support our development and maintenance effort. Additional features of xlsReadWritePro:
- work with data area subsets, - use (named) ranges and pick individual cells, - work with sheets (copy, rename, delete), - read/write formula values, - insert images, - use oleDateTime classes and many datetime helper functions, - append data to existing files and - work with in-memory objects (e.g. to compose Excel reports).

The trial (http://treetron.googlepages.com) is free and the two versions can easily be switched and coexist just fine. So, why not check it out for yourself?

Author(s)

Hans-Peter Suter

See Also

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


[Package xlsReadWrite version 1.3.2 Index]