excel files and R
On Wed, 25 Jun 2003, Simon Fear wrote:
Many many thanks. I did look at this but I have absolutely no idea of
the
background so got completely lost. Can you recommend a gentle
introduction/overview to this area, based on the assumption that my
current
knowledge equals zero? Indeed, could you make an argument that I should
ever
*want* to run R from within Excel or vice versa? I think I just want to
get
the data from Excel ('cos that's how it nearly always comes), but I
don't
want to process it in Excel, when I have R ...
I guess all that I and apparently others really want is that "foreign"
might
include read.excel, like it has read.sas and read.spss. Which is
essentially
what Bernhard Pfaff's recent post offers - thanks again Bernhard - but
using
RODBC instead of foreign.
The Excel .xls format is poorly documented, probably deliberately obfuscated. A direct interface is on the TODO list: it should be quite easy in Windows and possible in other OSes (there is code in Gnumeric, for example). In any case, this is a lot harder than the interfaces currently in foreign.
Brian D. Ripley, ripley at 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 272866 (PA) Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595