Loading Microsoft Excel workbooks

Loads or creates a Microsoft Excel workbook for further manipulation.

loadWorkbook(filename, create = FALSE, password = NULL)

Arguments

filename

Filename (absolute or relative) of Excel workbook to be loaded. Supported are Excel '97 (*.xls) and OOXML (Excel 2007+, *.xlsx) file formats. Paths are expanded using path.expand.

create

Specifies if the file should be created if it does not already exist (default is FALSE). Note that create = TRUE has no effect if the specified file exists, i.e. an existing file is loaded and not being recreated if create = TRUE.

password

Password to use when opening password protected files. The default NULL means no password is being used. This argument is ignored when creating new files using create = TRUE.

Value

Returns a workbook object for further manipulation.

References

Wikipedia: Office Open XML
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML

Author

Martin Studer
Mirai Solutions GmbH https://mirai-solutions.ch

Note

loadWorkbook is basically just a shortcut form of new("workbook", filename, create) with some additional error checking. As such it is the preferred way of creating workbook instances.

See also

workbook, saveWorkbook

Examples

if (FALSE) { # \dontrun{
# Load existing demo Excel file 'mtcars.xlsx' from the XLConnect package
wb.mtcars <- loadWorkbook(system.file("demoFiles/mtcars.xlsx", 
                          package = "XLConnect"))

# Create new workbook
wb.new <- loadWorkbook("myNewExcelFile.xlsx", create = TRUE)

# NOTE: The above statement does not write the file to disk! 
# saveWorkbook(wb.new) would need to be called in order to write/save 
# the file to disk!

# clean up 
file.remove("myNewExcelFile.xlsx")
} # }