Read part of an Excel sheet into an R data.frame

Documentation of the read.xlsx function: 

read.xlsx(file, sheetIndex, sheetName=NULL, rowIndex=NULL,  startRow=NULL, endRow=NULL, colIndex=NULL,  as.data.frame=TRUE, header=TRUE, colClasses=NA,  keepFormulas=FALSE, encoding="unknown", ...)

Returns a data.frame.
Example of use:

dtf <- file="filename,<!-----" read.xlsx="">
    sheetName = sheetname,
    rowIndex = 2:10, 
    colIndex = 5:20)