XLConnect 0.2-14

We are pleased to announce the release of XLConnect 0.2-14, now available from CRAN and from our GitHub repository.

This release is mainly a maintenance release and comes with the following changes:

• Upgrade to Apache POI 3.17
• Upgraded XLConnectJars dependency to version 0.2-14
• Fixed Java version specification in system requirements
• Checking Java version at runtime according to CRAN requirements
• Added existsCellStyle to check for existence of cell styles (#71)
• Added getOrCreateCellStyle combinator (#14, #71)
• Updates to vignettes: The XLConnect Package, XLConnect for the Impatient

The following example illustrates the use of XLConnect to produce a simple report:

require(XLConnect)

# Create new Excel workbook
wb <- loadWorkbook("earthquakes.xlsx", create = TRUE)

# Create worksheet to hold data
targetSheet <- "Earthquakes"
createSheet(wb, name = targetSheet)

# Export earthquake data
writeWorksheet(wb, data = quakes, sheet = targetSheet)

# Create cell style to color events with a magnitude >= 6.0 on the
# Richter scale
largeMagnitudeStyle <- getOrCreateCellStyle(wb, name = "Large Magnitude")

# Use solid red foreground to color rows
setFillForegroundColor(largeMagnitudeStyle, color = XLC$COLOR.RED)
setFillPattern(largeMagnitudeStyle, fill = XLC$FILL.SOLID_FOREGROUND)

# Determine large magnitude earthquakes
rowIdx <- which(quakes$mag >= 6.0)

# Color rows accordingly
# NOTE: Since we include a header row in the worksheet
# we need to offset the row indices by 1!
setCellStyle(wb, sheet = targetSheet, 
             row = rep(rowIdx + 1, each = ncol(quakes)),
             col = rep_len(seq_len(ncol(quakes)), length(rowIdx)),
             cellstyle = largeMagnitudeStyle)

# Save workbook
saveWorkbook(wb)

XLConnect is a comprehensive and cross-platform R package for manipulating Microsoft Excel files from within R. It does not require any installation of Microsoft Excel or any other special drivers to be able to read & write Excel files. The only requirement is a recent version of a Java Runtime Environment (JRE).