xlsx

An R package to read, write, format Excel 2007 and Excel 97/2000/XP/2003 files

The package provides R functions to read, write, and format Excel files. It depends on Java, but this makes it available on most operating systems.

Install

Stable version from CRAN

install.packages('xlsx')

Or development version from GitHub

devtools::install_github('colearendt/xlsx')

Common Problems

This package depends on Java and the rJava package to make the connection between R and Java seamless. In order to use the xlsx package, you will need to:

Ensure you have a jdk (Java Development Kit, version >= 1.5) installed for your Operating System. More information can be found on Oracle’s website
Ensure that the system environment variable JAVA_HOME is configured appropriately and points to your jdk of choice. Typically, this will be included in your PATH environment variable as well. Options and system environmental variables that are available from R can be seen with Sys.getenv()
Particularly on UNIX systems, if you continue experiencing issues, you may need to reconfigure R’s support for Java on your system. From a terminal, use the command R CMD javareconf. You may need to run this as root or prepended with sudo to ensure it has appropriate permission.

More detail can be found in the rJava docs.

Quick start

To read the first sheet from spreadsheet into a data.frame

read.xlsx2('file.xlsx', 1)

To write a data.frame to a spreadsheet

write.xlsx2(iris, file='iris.xlsx')

The package has many functions that make it easy to style and formalize output into Excel, as well.

wb <- createWorkbook()
s <- createSheet(wb,'test')

cs <- CellStyle(wb) + 
  Font(wb,heightInPoints = 16, isBold = TRUE) +
  Alignment(horizontal='ALIGN_CENTER')
  

r <- createRow(s,1)
cell <- createCell(r,1:ncol(iris))

setCellValue(cell[[1]],'Title for Iris')
for (i in cell) {
  setCellStyle(i,cs)
}

addMergedRegion(s, 1,1, 1,ncol(iris))

addDataFrame(iris, s, row.names=FALSE, startRow=3)

saveWorkbook(wb,'iris_pretty.xlsx')

Issues/Mailing list

To report a bug, use the Issues page at: https://github.com/colearendt/xlsx/issues

If you are wrestling with the Java dependency, there are some very good alternatives that do not require Java. Your choice will vary depending on what you are trying to accomplish.

Acknowledgements

The package is made possible thanks to the excellent work on Apache POI.