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.

This exercise is part of the course

Introduction to Importing Data in R

View Course

Exercise instructions

  • 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.

Hands-on interactive exercise

Have a go at this exercise by completing this sample code.

# Read all Excel sheets with lapply(): pop_list
pop_list <- ___

# Display the structure of pop_list
___