The R Book

Saving the File from Excel

Once you have made your dataframe in Excel and corrected all the inevitable data-entry and spelling errors, then you need to save the dataframe in a file format that can be read by R. Much the simplest way is to save all your dataframes from Excel as tab-delimited text files: File/Save As ... / then from the ‘Save as type’ options choose ‘Text (Tab delimited)’. There is no need to add a suffix, because Excel will automatically add ‘.txt’ to your file name. This file can then be read into R directly as a dataframe, using the read.table function like this:

data<-read.table("c:\\temp\\regression.txt",header=T)