[R] importing excel-file

[Gregory Warnes]

On Apr 18, 2007, at 1:58PM , Gabor Csardi wrote:

> On Wed, Apr 18, 2007 at 03:51:35PM -0200, Alberto Monteiro wrote:
>> Gabor Csardi wrote:
>> Ok, but who would be insane enough to use Excel in Linux or Mac? :-)

The original reason for read.xls() was to allow a web application  
running computations through R to handle data in the format the  
_user_ preferred.  Like it or not, most scientists store their  
experimental data in MS-Excel spreadsheets, and one needs to be able  
to handle them.... It turned out to be a lot easier to write a  
function for R to read in XLS data than to train our users to convert  
their data to .csv format.

-G
(author of the gdata package)