Writing named regions to a workbook

Writes data to the named regions defined in a workbook.

Usage

# S4 method for class 'workbook,ANY'
writeNamedRegion(object, data, name, header, 
  overwriteFormulaCells, rownames, worksheetScope)

Arguments

object: The workbook to use
data: Data to write
name: Name of the named region to write to
header: Specifies if the column names should be written. The default is TRUE.
overwriteFormulaCells: Specifies if existing formula cells in the workbook should be overwritten. The default is TRUE.
rownames: Name (character) of column to use for the row names of the provided data object. If specified, the row names of the data object (data.frame) will be included as an additional column with the specified name. If rownames = NULL (default), no row names will be included. May also be a list in case multiple data objects are written in one call (see below).
worksheetScope: Optional character vector with worksheet name(s) to limit the scope in which the name(s) to write to is/are expected to be found

Details

Writes data to the named region specified by name. Note that data is assumed to be a data.frame and is coerced to one if this is not already the case. The argument header specifies if the column names should be written. Note also that the arguments are vectorized and as such multiple named regions can be written with one call. In this case data is assumed to be a list of data objects (data.frame's).

References

What are named regions/ranges?
https://web.archive.org/web/20240821110221/https://www.officearticles.com/excel/named_ranges_in_microsoft_excel.htm
How to create named regions/ranges?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAE9a0uRtpM

Author

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

Note

Named regions are automatically redefined to the area occupied by the written cells. This guarantees that the complete set of data can be re-read using readNamedRegion. Also, this allows the named region just to be defined as the top left cell to be written to. There is no need to know the exact size of the data in advance.

When writing data to Excel, writeNamedRegion further applies cell styles to the cells as defined by the workbook's "style action" (see setStyleAction).

Examples

if (FALSE) { # \dontrun{
# Load workbook (create if not existing)
wb <- loadWorkbook("writeNamedRegion.xlsx", create = TRUE)

# Create a worksheet named 'mtcars'
createSheet(wb, name = "mtcars")

# Create a named region called 'mtcars' on the sheet called 'mtcars'
createName(wb, name = "mtcars", formula = "mtcars!$A$1")

# Write built-in data set 'mtcars' to the above defined named region
# (using header = TRUE)
writeNamedRegion(wb, mtcars, name = "mtcars")

createSheet(wb, name="iris")
setActiveSheet(wb, "iris")

# Do the same with the iris data set, with a worksheet-scoped name
createName(wb, name = "iris", formula = "iris!$A$1", worksheetScope = "iris")
writeNamedRegion(wb, iris, name = "iris", worksheetScope="iris")

# Save workbook (this actually writes the file to disk)
saveWorkbook(wb)

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