From ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk  Mon Aug 20 19:52:35 2001
From: ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk (Prof Brian Ripley)
Date: Mon, 20 Aug 2001 19:52:35 +0100 (BST)
Subject: [Rd] Excel -> *.CSV in Unix (Linux) command line?
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.10.10108201442190.3905-100000@hsph.harvard.edu>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.31.0108201949330.22859-100000@gannet.stats>

On Mon, 20 Aug 2001, Byron Ellis wrote:

> On Mon, 20 Aug 2001, Kurt Hornik wrote:
> >
> > Martin,
> >
> > One remark.  If we think we want to be able to import Excel data
> > directly into R then neither solution will do I think: the xls2csv
> > program from (2) is not good enough, and the other solutions require
> > tools that may not be available.  (Effort is currently put into removing
> > run-time and even build-time dependency on Perl and shell tools, and use
> > R scripts instead.)
> >
> > I think it would be nice if package `foreign' had at least limited
> > support for reading in .xls files ...
>
> There is complete documentation for the Excel format (BIFF I think its
> called) in the Excel SDK--- I'm not sure where you get it (it is probably
> on one of the MSDN CDs somewhere, but it doesn't appear to be on the
> website). For Excel 2002 (aka ExcelXP) as with most of the MS OfficeXP
> line, they've added native XML support making reading/writing files much
> less of a problem.

Unfortunately, it's plain wrong according to the authors of the Perl
addons.

Gnumeric has reasonably readable code for this ...

It's a problem: those who really need this have ways (Star Office,
Gnumeric, Perl scripts, rebooting into W2k) and those who don't haven;t
the motivation.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

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[Rd] Excel -> *.CSV in Unix (Linux) command line?
Prof Brian Ripley