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  3. Introduction to Importing Data in R
  • 1

    Importing data from flat files with utils

    Free

    A lot of data comes in the form of flat files: simple tabular text files. Learn how to import the common formats of flat file data with base R functions.

  • 2

    readr & data.table

    In addition to base R, there are dedicated packages to easily and efficiently import flat file data. We'll talk about two such packages: readr and data.table.

  • 3

    Importing Excel data

    Excel is a widely used data analysis tool. If you prefer to do your analyses in R, though, you'll need an understanding of how to import .csv data into R. This chapter will show you how to use readxl to do so.

  • 4

    Reproducible Excel work with XLConnect

    Beyond importing data from Excel, you can take things one step further with XLConnect. Learn all about it and bridge the gap between R and Excel.

Initializing

Exercise

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().

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 (view) file.

Instructions

100 XP
  • Use lapply() in combination with excel_sheets() and read_excel() to read all the Excel sheets in "urbanpop.xlsx". Name the resulting list pop_list.
  • Print the structure of pop_list.