R: Use Excel as Viewer for a Data.Frame

XLView {DescTools} | R Documentation

## Use Excel as Viewer for a Data.Frame

### Description

`XLView` can be used to view and edit a data.frame directly in Excel, resp. to create a new data.frame in Excel.

### Usage

    XLView(x, col.names = TRUE, row.names = FALSE, na = "", preserveStrings = FALSE)

    XLKill()

### Arguments

`x` | is a data.frame to be transferred to Excel. If data is missing a new file will be created.
`row.names` | either a logical value indicating whether the row names of x are to be written along with x, or a character vector of row names to be written.
`col.names` | either a logical value indicating whether the column names of x are to be written along with x, or a character vector of column names to be written. See the section on 'CSV files' `write.table` for the meaning of `col.names = NA`.
`na` | the string to use for missing values in the data.
`preserveStrings` | logical, will preserve strings from being converted to numerics when imported in Excel. See details. Default is `FALSE`.

### Details

The data.frame will be exported in CSV format and then imported in Excel. When importing data, Excel will potentially change characters to numeric values. If this seems undesirable (maybe we're loosing leading zeros) then you should enclose the text in quotes and preset a =. x <- `gettextf('="%s"', x)` would do the trick.
Take care: Changes to the data made in Excel will NOT automatically be updated in the original data.frame. The user will have to read the csv-file into R again. See examples how to get this done.
`XLKill` will kill a running XL instance (which might be invisible). Background is the fact, that the simple XL$quit() command would not terminate a running XL task, but only set it invisible (observe the TaskManager). This ghost version may sometimes confuse XLView and hinder to create a new instance. In such cases you have to do the garbage collection...

### Value

the name/path of the temporary file edited in Excel.

### Note

The function works only in Windows and requires RDCOMClient to be installed (see: Additional_repositories in DESCRIPTION of the package).

### Author(s)

Andri Signorell <andri@signorell.net>

### See Also

`GetNewXL`, `XLGetRange`, `XLGetWorkbook`

### Examples

    ## Not run: # Windows-specific example
    XLView(d.diamonds)

    # edit an existing data.frame in Excel, make changes and save there, return the filename
    fn <- XLView(d.diamonds)
    # read the changed file and store in new data.frame
    d.frm <- read.table(fn, header=TRUE, quote="", sep=";")

    # Create a new file, edit it in Excel...
    fn <- XLView()
    # ... and read it into a data.frame when in R again
    d.set <- read.table(fn, header=TRUE, quote="", sep=";")

    # Export a ftable object, quite elegant...
    XLView(format(ftable(Titanic), quote=FALSE), row.names = FALSE, col.names = FALSE)

    ## End(Not run)

[Package DescTools version 0.99.25 Index]