Importing an Excel spreadsheet

I am trying to import an *.xls spreadsheet into R. I am doing this as 
follows:

 > read.table(file("A5_DL.xls"))

So I copied it all over to a text document and tried to import that, thus:

 > read.table("A5.txt")

The error I got then was:
Error in scan(file, what, nmax, sep, dec, quote, skip, nlines, 
na.strings, :
line 26 did not have 34 elements
Having gone over the line in question, it all seems to be the same as 
any other row. I really don't want to have to manually re-enter the data 
(some 98 rows x 26 columns).
Thanks

Andy