Excel -> *.CSV in Unix (Linux) command line?
On Mon, 20 Aug 2001, Byron Ellis wrote:
On Mon, 20 Aug 2001, Kurt Hornik wrote:
Martin, One remark. If we think we want to be able to import Excel data directly into R then neither solution will do I think: the xls2csv program from (2) is not good enough, and the other solutions require tools that may not be available. (Effort is currently put into removing run-time and even build-time dependency on Perl and shell tools, and use R scripts instead.) I think it would be nice if package `foreign' had at least limited support for reading in .xls files ...
There is complete documentation for the Excel format (BIFF I think its called) in the Excel SDK--- I'm not sure where you get it (it is probably on one of the MSDN CDs somewhere, but it doesn't appear to be on the website). For Excel 2002 (aka ExcelXP) as with most of the MS OfficeXP line, they've added native XML support making reading/writing files much less of a problem.
Unfortunately, it's plain wrong according to the authors of the Perl addons. Gnumeric has reasonably readable code for this ... It's a problem: those who really need this have ways (Star Office, Gnumeric, Perl scripts, rebooting into W2k) and those who don't haven;t the motivation.
Brian D. Ripley, ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/ University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self) 1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272860 (secr) Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595 -.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.- r-devel mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe" (in the "body", not the subject !) To: r-devel-request@stat.math.ethz.ch _._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._