Working with Excel files

Excel is another popular tool used to store and analyze data. Of course, one can convert Excel files to CSV files or other text formats by using Excel. Alternatively, to simplify the process, you can use install and load the xlsx package to read and process Excel data in R.

Getting ready

In this recipe, you need to prepare your environment with R installed and a computer that can access the Internet.

How to do it…

Please perform the following steps to read Excel documents:

1. First, install and load the xlsx package:

   > install.packages("xlsx")
   > library(xlsx)
   

2. Access www.data.worldbank.org/topic/economy-and-growth to find world economy indicator data in Excel:
   

   Figure 6: World economy indicator

3. Download world economy indicator data from the following URL using download.file:

   > download.file("http://api.worldbank.org/v2/en/topic/3?downloadformat=excel", "worldbank.xls", mode="wb")
   

4. Examine the downloaded file with Excel (or...