Loading Excel spreadsheets
One of the most popular file formats to store and transfer relatively small amounts of data in academic institutions and businesses (besides CSV files) is still Excel xls (or xlsx, more recently). The first is a proprietary binary file format from Microsoft, which is exhaustively documented (the xls specification is available in a document of more than 1,100 pages and 50 megabytes!), but importing multiple sheets, macros, and formulas is not straightforward even nowadays. This section will only cover the most used platform-independent packages to interact with Excel.
One option is to use the previously discussed RODBC package with the Excel driver to query an Excel spreadsheet. Other ways of accessing Excel data depend ...
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