[R] reading dates in Excel into R

[Hans-Peter Suter]

2010/7/30 Dimitri Liakhovitski <dimitri.liakhovitski at gmail.com>:
> I've wasted a lot of time trying to read in dates from Excel. Even
> importing .csv files has not guarantees and often produces garbage
> instead of dates.
> What I found works best is saving the Excel data base as a
> tab-delimited file .txt (after having formatted the dates in the
> format you need, e.g., mm/dd/yyyy). And then you can read it
> (including dates) into R no problems.

If you are on windows and (can) use .xls files, my xlsReadWrite
package should work well with dates.

Cheers,
Hans-Peter