[R] MS Excel Data

[Gabor Grothendieck]

On Nov 29, 2007 3:01 PM, Bert Gunter <gunter.berton at gene.com> wrote:
> This has been discussed on this list many times before. Google on "Import
> Excel R". Note also that there are potential problems (loss of digits) due
> to Excel "idiosyncracies" depending on what you do.
> http://www.burns-stat.com/pages/Tutor/spreadsheet_addiction.html  provides
> some details.
>
> Finally, I have found that for rectangular data sets with no missing fields
> in Excel (tables), cutting and read.tabling **the data only ** is a
> simple(but probably not without risk) way to do it:
>
> (after cutting the data only in Excel to the clipboard) in R:
>
> newdat <- read.table("clipboard", head=FALSE, row.names=NULL)
>
> The columns can then be named via names(newdat) <- ...
>
> I omit column headers because in most of the Excel data I get the column
> names have spaces and other non-alphanumeric characters which R cannot
> easily digest. One could separately scan() just the vector of column headers
> and use regular expressions to extract the names. But for small tables, I
> find it easier just to create the names manually.

You can include headers with spaces in the copy with:

    DF <- read.delim("clipboard")