Reading in xls and xlsx files in R

Question

I am working with loads of xls and xlsx files at the same time with no easy way to convert them to the same file type.

I am facing issue reading them in because read.xlsx() from "xlsx" package works just fine with xls files but I am getting the Java Out of Memory error when trying to read in xlsx files. I tried to use the following line to extend memories with no success: options(java.parameters = "-Xmx1000m") As an alternative option I have tried read.xlsx() from "openxlsx" package but it does not read xls files and the aforementioned two packages are not compatible when loaded at the same time. I faced the same difficulty with the "XLConnect" package where again I face java errors when trying to use "xlsx" and "XLConnect" packages loaded at the same time.

I would be interested what people do to solve situations like this?

Answer 1

You can consider the read_excel function in the readxl package:

read_excel(path, sheet = 1, col_names = TRUE, col_types = NULL, na = "", skip = 0)

You can even specify which sheet in the xlsx file you want to import in, whether the first row consists of column names, as well as the missing value used in the excel files.