[R] convert *.xls to text

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On Tue, Mar 30, 2004 at 11:02:23AM -0500, Whit Armstrong wrote:
> Has anyone looked into using the Jakarta POI to save R data directly to xls
> format?
> 
> http://jakarta.apache.org/poi/index.html
> 
> One of the advantages of POI over the DCOM interface is that one could use
> unix/linux platforms to generate excel files / reports.

There are other (non-Java) possibilities:

-- Spreadsheet::WriteExcel is Perl and works whereever Perl works, there is a
   sibbling Spreadsheet::ParseExcel too. Greg Warnes has built another
   xls2csv around this.

-- Gretl (http://gretl.sf.net) has an add-on module for reading .xls that has
   been lifted from other Open Source projects; one could probably build
   something around the libole2 library from the Gnome project.

> I would be interested in collaborating with anyone who has a serious
> interest in building an R package for this purpose.

I would second that, but I really have no spare capacity for more new
projects. I'd try to help, though.

Dirk

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