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  3. Introduction to Importing Data in R

Exercise

read.xls() wraps around read.table()

Remember how read.xls() actually works? It basically comes down to two steps: converting the Excel file to a .csv file using a Perl script, and then reading that .csv file with the read.csv() function that is loaded by default in R, through the utils package.

This means that all the options that you can specify in read.csv(), can also be specified in read.xls().

The urbanpop.xls (view) dataset is already available in your workspace. It's still comprised of three sheets, and has column names in the first row of each sheet.

Instructions

100 XP
  • Finish the read.xls() call that reads data from the second sheet of urbanpop.xls: skip the first 50 rows of the sheet. Make sure to set header appropriately and that the country names are not imported as factors.
  • Print the first 10 observations of urban_pop with head().