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)

Export Excel files with multiple sheets from R using XLSX

require(xlsx)
wb = createWorkbook()

# Create a first sheet
sheet  = createSheet(wb, sheetName="NewSheet.1")
rows = createRow(sheet, rowIndex=1:2)
cells = createCell(rows, colIndex=1:8)
setCellValue(cells[[1,1]],"Text")
setCellValue(cells[[1,2]],-0.1)
setCellValue(cells[[1,3]],"=B1+1")

# Create another sheet
sheet  = createSheet(wb, sheetName="NewSheet.2")
rows = createRow(sheet, rowIndex=1:2)
cells = createCell(rows, colIndex=1:8)
setCellValue(cells[[1,1]],"Text")

# Save Excel file and show me the names of the sheets that have been created
saveWorkbook(wb, "trying out.xlsx")
names(getSheets(wb) )

XLSX Package on CRAN

XLSX is based on the Apache  POI project. I still need to figure out  how to evaluate formulas in the Excel file. There may be some help at the Apache POI formula evaluation page.

Installing RExcel

I wanted to install RExcel from the cran package.
The think is that you need this packages installed before:

• rscproxy 2.0-5
• rcom 2.2-5

For the next install, If I need to reinstall RExcel for someone else, I think I'll try using this RandFriends package. Which installs R together with the required extension for running RExcel.