For loading Excel data and many others file formats, one possibility is to use the free conversion utility: DataLoad.
See: http://www.vsn-intl.com/genstat/downloads/datald.htm (there're probably also other links)
It should be easy to create R wrappers to use that utility.
Cheers -- Fan
Marc Schwartz wrote:
On Wed, 2003-06-25 at 09:20, Thomas Lumley wrote:
On Wed, 25 Jun 2003, Simon Fear wrote:
I guess all that I and apparently others really want is that "foreign" might include read.excel, like it has read.sas and read.spss. Which is essentially what Bernhard Pfaff's recent post offers - thanks again Bernhard - but using RODBC instead of foreign.
It would be nice, but it's quite hard to read Excel off Windows.
The formats in foreign are either documented by the vendor (accurately in the case of Stata and Epi Info, with some omissions for SAS XPORT) or that have been reverse-engineered by someone else (read.spss is based on PSPP, an attempt at an SPSS clone by Ben Pfaaf, and I think Duncan Murdoch did read.S).
While it isn't usual to say nice things about commercial vendors on these lists I would like to note that Stata not only documents its file format in its manuals (with some helpful C snippets for the trickier parts), but made available the file format for their `large data set' version 7/SE, which I didn't buy.
-thomas
Simon,
To add to Thomas' comments and respond to your thoughts, if one were so inclined, given that R is a volunteer effort, I suspect that an addition to 'foreign' for Excel would indeed be appreciated by many users.
One resource, with appropriate attribution given, would be the source code for OpenOffice.org's (OOo) Calc. Since Calc can read and write Excel formats without using Windows/Office DLL's, it seems reasonable to presume that OOo has reverse engineered the native Excel file structure. Since OOo's source is available under the GPL, this could provide the basis for a "read.excel" function.
Yet another would be Gnumeric, which like Calc is GPL'd and can read and write native Excel file formats.
More information is available at:
http://www.openoffice.org/dev_docs/source/1.0.3/source.html
http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric/
Food for thought... :-)
Regards,
Marc Schwartz
______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
