excel files and R

Yet another would be Gnumeric, which like Calc is GPL'd and can read and
write native Excel file formats.

The Gretl econometrics package (http://gretl.sf.net) also has a small
library for reading Excel files (in the file plugin/excel_import.c), its
code goes back to

/*
  Based on xls2csv (David Rysdam, 1998), as distributed in the 
  "catdoc" package by Vitus Wagner, with help from the Gnumeric
  excel plugin by Michael Meeks.
 */
      
I have meant to muck with this for some time now, but this is a very low
priority item for me and other things keep popping up.

Dirk

Don't drink and derive. Alcohol and analysis don't mix.