Save Excel spreadsheet as .csv with R?

Question

What is the simplest way to convert a large Excel spreadsheet with multiple worksheets into .CSV files in R?

Note that I\'ve tested XLConnect and XLSX and found that m

Answer 1

http://rwiki.sciviews.org/doku.php?id=tips:data-io:ms_windows

EDIT: to address the read.xlsx option:

If you have Perl running, you need a current version of gdata

require(gdata)
installXLSXsupport()   #now the example from help(read.xls)
    # load the third worksheet, skipping the first two non-data lines...
    if( 'XLSX' %in% xlsFormats() )  # if XLSX is supported..
      data <- read.xls(exampleFile2007, sheet="Sheet with initial text", skip=2)
 data
#-----------------------
   X       X.1 D E.  F  G Factor
1 NA  FirstRow 1 NA NA NA   Red 
2 NA SecondRow 2  1 NA NA Green 
3 NA  ThirdRow 3  2  1 NA   Red 
4 NA FourthRow 4  3  2  1 Black 
#------------------------
write.csv(data)

This was done on a Mac and up until this question I had always stumbled at the installXLSXsupport() stage since I always got an error. This time I started up Perl from a Terminal command line, and got success after first setting up my personal configuration, defining CPAN mirrors on my continent, and I left perl running.

Answer 2

Here's a loop to write out all sheets:

require(gdata)
## install support for xlsx files
installXLSXsupport()
excelFile <- ("/full/path/to/excelFile.xlsx")
## note that the perl scripts that gdata uses do not cope well will tilde expansion
## on *nix machines. So use the full path. 
numSheets <- sheetCount(excelFile, verbose=TRUE)

for ( i in 1:numSheets) {
  mySheet <- read.xls(excelFile, sheet=i)
  write.csv(mySheet, file=paste(i, "csv", sep="."), row.names=FALSE)
}

Answer 3

Updated answer based on readxl package.

library("readxl")

#function to read all sheets of a workbook
read_excel_allsheets <- function(filename) {
  sheets <- readxl::excel_sheets(filename)
  x <-    lapply(sheets, function(X) readxl::read_excel(filename, sheet = X))
  names(x) <- sheets
  x
}

sheetnames <- read_excel_allsheets("excelFile.xlsx")
names(sheetnames)