[R] Read in from multiple Excel wksheets

[dM/]

I’ve got an Excel workbook with about 30 worksheets.  Each worksheet
has 10000 rows of data over 30 columns.

I’d like to read the data from each worksheet into a dataframe or
matrix in R for processing.  Normally, I use read.csv when interacting
with Excel but I’d rather manipulate a multisheet workbook directly
than set about splitting the original workbook and saving down each
part as a csv.

So far, I’ve tried using read.xlsx from the xlsx package.  This works
fine for small test files – e.g. suppose I’m trying to read from the
test_file workbook on my desktop.  The following code extracts rows 1
and 2 from worksheet = “johnny”.

setwd("C:\\Documents and Settings\\dmenezes\\Desktop")
info<-
read.xlsx("test_file.xlsx",sheetName="johnny",rowIndex=1:2,header=FALSE)
info

However, when I try to apply this to my real, large workbook, things
go wrong, with the following error message.  Any ideas/workarounds?

Error in .jcall("RJavaTools", "Ljava/lang/Object;", "invokeMethod",
cl,  :
  java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space