Writing Data From R to Excel Files (xls|xlsx)

Preleminary tasks
Writing Excel files using xlsx package
Summary
Related articles
Infos

Previously, we described the essentials of R programming and provided quick start guides for reading and writing txt and csv files using R base functions as well as using a most modern R package named readr, which is faster (X10) than R base functions. We also described different ways for reading data from Excel files into R.

Here, you’ll learn how to export data from R to Excel files (xls or xlsx file formats). We’ll use the xlsx R package.

Preleminary tasks

Launch RStudio as described here: Running RStudio and setting up your working directory

Writing Excel files using xlsx package

The xlsx package, a java-based solution, is one of the powerful R packages to read, write and format Excel files.

Installing and loading xlsx package

Install

install.packages("xlsx")

Load

library("xlsx")

Using xlsx package

There are two main functions in xlsx package for writing both xls and xlsx Excel files: write.xlsx() and write.xlsx2() [faster on big files compared to write.xlsx function].

The simplified formats are:

write.xlsx(x, file, sheetName = "Sheet1", 
  col.names = TRUE, row.names = TRUE, append = FALSE)
write.xlsx2(x, file, sheetName = "Sheet1",
  col.names = TRUE, row.names = TRUE, append = FALSE)

x: a data.frame to be written into the workbook
file: the path to the output file
sheetName: a character string to use for the sheet name.
col.names, row.names: a logical value specifying whether the column names/row names of x are to be written to the file
append: a logical value indicating if x should be appended to an existing file.

Example of usage: the following R code will write the R built-in data sets - USArrests, mtcars and iris - into the same Excel file:

library("xlsx")
# Write the first data set in a new workbook
write.xlsx(USArrests, file = "myworkbook.xlsx",
      sheetName = "USA-ARRESTS", append = FALSE)
# Add a second data set in a new worksheet
write.xlsx(mtcars, file = "myworkbook.xlsx", 
           sheetName="MTCARS", append=TRUE)
# Add a third data set
write.xlsx(iris, file = "myworkbook.xlsx",
           sheetName="IRIS", append=TRUE)

Read more about for reading, writing and formatting Excel files:

Summary

Write data from R to Excel files using xlsx package: write.xlsx(my_data, file = “result.xlsx”, sheetName = “my_data”, append = FALSE).

Infos

This analysis has been performed using R (ver. 3.2.3).

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