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Excel files have become a standard in the business and academic world for data storage and sharing due to their intuitive formatting and widespread acceptance. However, reading Excel files in R programming language has been a common issue faced by the community of R programmers.
In this article, we will discuss one of the most useful libraries in R for handling Excel files named readxl. We will go over how to load it into your workspace, read Excel files and how to handle issues you might encounter.
Contents
Libraries for Reading Excel Files
R language does not have a built-in ability to read Excel files but fortunately, there are libraries developed to provide this functionality. Some of the commonly used libraries are readxl, xlsx, openxlsx and readxls.
Using Readxl Library
The readxl library in R makes reading Excel files a straightforward operation. To install readxl, you can use the following command:
install.packages("readxl")
After installation, you load the library into your workspace with this command:
library(readxl)
Reading Excel Files in R
To read an Excel file, the command is simple:
data <- read_excel(path_to_file) [/code] With path_to_file being the location of the Excel file on your computer. After running this command, the content of your file will be stored in the variable data, ready to be used for your data analysis.
Handling issues that might arise with different Excel versions can be time-consuming. With readxl, you don’t need to worry about whether your file is .xls or .xlsx as it can handle both formats.
Conclusion about reading Excel files in R
Reading Excel files in R isn’t fundamentally complex. As we have seen, using the readxl library makes this process simple and effective. Hopefully, with the knowledge from this article, you can confidently read and start processing your Excel data using R.
