Recently, Hadley Wickham introduced a new package to read Excel files (XLS, XLSX). The main advantage is that no external dependencies is required for readxl. (xlsx package requires Java Runtime to be installed)
With xlsx:
library(xlsx)
library(httr)
url <- "https://rawgit.com/yoke2/dsxref/master/iris.xlsx"
GET(url, write_disk("iris.xlsx", overwrite=TRUE))
iris <- read.xlsx("iris.xlsx", sheetIndex=1, header=TRUE)
head(iris, 3)
## NA. Sepal.Length Sepal.Width Petal.Length Petal.Width Species
## 1 1 5.1 3.5 1.4 0.2 setosa
## 2 2 4.9 3.0 1.4 0.2 setosa
## 3 3 4.7 3.2 1.3 0.2 setosa
With readxl:
library(readxl)
library(httr)
url <- "https://rawgit.com/yoke2/dsxref/master/iris.xlsx"
GET(url, write_disk("iris.xlsx", overwrite=TRUE))
iris <- read_excel("iris.xlsx")
head(iris, 3)
## Sepal.Length Sepal.Width Petal.Length Petal.Width Species
## 1 1 5.1 3.5 1.4 0.2 setosa
## 2 2 4.9 3.0 1.4 0.2 setosa
## 3 3 4.7 3.2 1.3 0.2 setosa
Find out more on the features, usage and installation at its Github repository.