Importing from Excel

Eventually the easiest seems to be to make sure each column in the spreadsheet
starts with a numeric, and replace it once the object is in R.

There is probably a better way.

I tend to export to CSV files, and read.table or read.csv those into R. 
  That seems to be the cleanest way, and is well-supported in R.

One note is that if you have both row and column names, you need to 
remove the first column from your header row in the CSV, or R gets confused.

Regards,

   - Brian