[R] Importing Large Dataset into Excel

Julian Burgos jmburgos at u.washington.edu
Wed Dec 12 19:09:35 CET 2007


Hi Wayne,

I'm assuming that you file is really a comma-separated file (*.csv) and 
not an Excel workbook (*.xls) saved with a .csv extension, right?  That 
(in my experience) is a common mistake.
You should open your file with a simple text editor (notepad will do if 
the file is not too large) and review line 528, instead of reviewing the 
spreadsheet in Excel.  You should be able to spot the problem right away.

Julian


Wayne Aldo Gavioli wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> 
> I seem to be having a problem importing a data set from Excel into R.  I'm using
> the "read.table" command to import the data with the following line of code:
> 
>> newborn<-read.table("newborn edit.csv", header=T, sep=",")
> 
> 
> where "newborn edit.csv" is the name of the file.  Unfortunately, I'm getting
> back the following error message:
> 
> 
> "Error in scan(file,, what, nmax, sep, dc, quote, skip, nlines, na.string, :
> line 528 did not have 44 elements"
> 
> 
> As far as I can tell, line 528 of the spreadsheet table does have the same
> number of elements as the other rows - by chance can this error message mean
> anything else?  Also, is there an easier way to import data from R into Excel
> using a single line of R code?
> 
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> 
> Wayne
> 
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.



More information about the R-help mailing list