Reading a workbook
In the previous exercise you generated a list of three Excel sheets that you imported. However, loading in every sheet manually and then merging them in a list can be quite tedious. Luckily, you can automate this with lapply(). If you have no experience with lapply(), feel free to take Chapter 4 of the Intermediate R course.
Have a look at the example code below:
my_workbook <- lapply(excel_sheets("data.xlsx"),
read_excel,
path = "data.xlsx")
The read_excel() function is called multiple times on the "data.xlsx" file and each sheet is loaded in one after the other. The result is a list of data frames, each data frame representing one of the sheets in data.xlsx.
You're still working with the urbanpop.xlsx file.
This exercise is part of the course
Importing Data in R (Part 1)
Exercise instructions
- Use
lapply()in combination withexcel_sheets()andread_excel()to read all the Excel sheets in"urbanpop.xlsx". Name the resulting listpop_list. - Print the structure of
pop_list.
Hands-on interactive exercise
Have a go at this exercise by completing this sample code.
# The readxl package is already loaded
# Read all Excel sheets with lapply(): pop_list
# Display the structure of pop_list