Previously, we described the essentials of R programming and provided quick start guides for reading and writing txt and csv files using R base functions as well as using a most modern R package named readr, which is faster (X10) than R base functions. We also described different ways for reading data from Excel files into R.
Preleminary tasks
Launch RStudio as described here: Running RStudio and setting up your working directory
Writing Excel files using xlsx package
The xlsx package, a java-based solution, is one of the powerful R packages to read, write and formatExcel files.
Installing and loading xlsx package
- Install
install.packages("xlsx")- Load
library("xlsx")Using xlsx package
There are two main functions in xlsx package for writing both xls and xlsx Excel files: write.xlsx() and write.xlsx2() [faster on big files compared to write.xlsx function].
The simplified formats are:
write.xlsx(x, file, sheetName = "Sheet1",
col.names = TRUE, row.names = TRUE, append = FALSE)
write.xlsx2(x, file, sheetName = "Sheet1",
col.names = TRUE, row.names = TRUE, append = FALSE)- x: a data.frame to be written into the workbook
- file: the path to the output file
- sheetName: a character string to use for the sheet name.
- col.names, row.names: a logical value specifying whether the column names/row names of x are to be written to the file
- append: a logical value indicating if x should be appended to an existing file.
Example of usage: the following R code will write the R built-in data sets - USArrests, mtcars and iris - into the same Excel file:
library("xlsx")
# Write the first data set in a new workbook
write.xlsx(USArrests, file = "myworkbook.xlsx",
sheetName = "USA-ARRESTS", append = FALSE)
# Add a second data set in a new worksheet
write.xlsx(mtcars, file = "myworkbook.xlsx",
sheetName="MTCARS", append=TRUE)
# Add a third data set
write.xlsx(iris, file = "myworkbook.xlsx",
sheetName="IRIS", append=TRUE)Read more
Read more about for reading, writing and formatting Excel files:
Summary
Infos
This analysis has been performed using R (ver. 3.2.3).