Import Excel files from the web

When you learned about gdata, it was already mentioned that gdata can handle .xls files that are located on a remote web server. readxl can't, at least not yet. The URL with which you'll be working is already available in the sample code. You will import it once using gdata and once with the readxl package via a workaround.

Load the readxl and gdata packages. They are already installed on DataCamp's servers.
Import the .xls file located at the URL url_xls using read.xls() from gdata. Store the resulting data frame as excel_gdata.
You can not use read_excel() directly with a URL. Complete the following instructions to work around this problem:
Use download.file() to download the .xls file behind the URL and store it locally as "local_latitude.xls".
Call read_excel() to import the local file, "local_latitude.xls". Name the resulting data frame excel_readxl.

Take Hint (-30 XP)

Exercise

Import Excel files from the web

Instructions