Using the xlsx package to connect to Excel

There are multiple packages to connect Excel with R; in this recipe, we discuss the xlsx package. Other commonly used packages are RExcel and XLConnect.

Getting ready

If you have not already downloaded the files for this chapter, do it now and ensure that the files are in your R working directory:

  • Install xlsx using install.packages("xlsx")
  • Load the library using library(xlsx)
  • Read the data:
    > auto <- read.csv("auto-mpg.csv", stringsAsFactors=FALSE)

How to do it...

To connect to Excel using the xlsx package, follow the steps:

  1. Save a data frame to an Excel workbook:
    > write.xlsx(auto, file = "auto.xlsx", sheetName = "autobase", row.names = FALSE)
  2. Add two new columns to the auto data frame:
    > auto$kmpg <- auto$mpg ...

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