[R] excel files and R

[Thomas Lumley]

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