< 1 min. read 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 […]