To load excel file in R/ R studio

Question

My questions are:

I am able to read the file using read.csv but read.table gives me an error. I've also tried the following codes, but failed to read the file:

read.table("hw1_data R programming.xlsx", header = TRUE, sep = ",")

read.table("hw1_data R programming.xlsx", sep = ",")

read.table("hw1_data R programming.xlsx", header = TRUE, sep = ",",fileEncoding='UCS-2LE')

How can I use read.table?

• What are the advantages (or disadvantages) of using read.table over read.csv and vice versa? [I belive one point is: read.table don't require files to be saved in csv format, which is the case generally. Am I right?]

• I've googled for ways to load excel file in R and found http://www.r-tutor.com/r-introduction/data-frame/data-import, http://www.statmethods.net/input/importingdata.html and tried installing gdata (and also with xlsx). And finally was able to load the file. But I wonder, why do we need all these steps installing packages like gdata/xlsx/etc...perl) , if we can simply do the same thing by read.csv or read.table.
  What are the advantages (or disadvantages) of using these packages over read.table and read.csv and vice versa?

Answer 1

Try...

install.packages("readxl")
library(readxl)
hw1 <- read_excel("hw1_data R programming.xlsx")