[R] Import from excel 2007

[Earl F. Glynn]

"Marc Schwartz" <marc_schwartz at comcast.net> wrote in message 
news:1192550659.3526.20.camel at Bellerophon.localdomain...
> On Tue, 2007-10-16 at 14:38 +0100, Arnold Akem wrote:
>> Hey Seniors,
>>
>>   Really new to R, please has anyone imported a dataset from MS office
>> excel 2007 into R yet? It seem to be giving me hard times which I did
>> not expect as it use to go well with the previous versions.
>>
>>   Thanks in advance.
>>   arnoldo
>
>
> Office 2007 is using a new format (.xlsx, .docx, etc.) that is not yet
> compatible with most applications (including OpenOffice), since MS does
> not document it.
>
> The best thing to do is to save the Excel file as a .CSV file and then
> use read.csv() to import the data.

Your question made me curious about RODBC and Excel, so I ran a test using 
Excel 2007.

Using RODBC (Version 1.2-1) with R 2.6.0 with Windows Vista, I cannot read 
any of the new Excel formats, which there are three:

.xlsx - Excel Workbook
.xlsb - Excel Binary Workbook
.xlsm - Excel Macro-Enable Workbook

I get the same error for all three:  "ODBC Excel Driver Logic Failed: 
External table is not in the expected format."

When saving new Excel 2007 files, you can select "Save As" and "Excel 
97-2003 Workbook" and use those .xls files like before with RODBC in R.

But be careful using RODBC and Excel, such as this problem:

RODBC and Excel: Wrong Data Type Assumed on Import
http://tolstoy.newcastle.edu.au/R/help/05/11/14938.html


efg

Earl F. Glynn
Scientific Programmer
Stowers Institute for Medical Research