Does the xlsx package work for xlsm files in R?

Question

I am trying to read a range into a data.frame from a xlsm workbook. Can I do this with the xlsx package in R? If not, does anyone know of a way to do it?

Thank you!

Answer 1

Did you try using read.xlsx or read.xlsx2 as described in the manual?

http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/xlsx/xlsx.pdf

If these do not work with your file format, and you are trying to access tabular data you might want to open the .xlsm and export your data to csv format.

These are easily imported uisng read.csv('filename.csv')

Answer 2

read.xlsx from R3.2 will read in data saved in an xlsm workbook, but you need the correct postfix and the file saved in the same directory (or full filename), e.g.

LotsofmydatainRdataframe <- read.xlsx(LotsofmydatainExcel.xlsm,sheetName="Deaths",as.data.frame=TRUE)

if you try just LotsofmydatainExcel or LotsofmydatainExcel.xlsx then file will not be found.

Annoyingly the following produces an unknown format xlsm error in R

write.xlsx(LotsofmydatainRdataframe, LotsofmydatainExcel.xlsm,sheetName="Output")

Answer 3

For future reference (this question was from 2012), you can do this with the read_excel package, and xlsm support was added in 2015

read_excel('filename.xlsm', sheet = 'sheetname', range = 'A1:B5')