XLConnect 1.0.1

XLConnect 1.0.1 now available from CRAN and from our GitHub repository.

We are pleased to announce the release of XLConnect 1.0.1. This release is mainly a maintenance release and comes with the following changes:

• Upgrade to Apache POI 4.1
• Adapt Java implementation to make use of Java 8 and remove some dependencies
• Remove dependency on XLConnectJars, download required jars at installation time

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

require(XLConnect)

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

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

# Export city data
writeWorksheet(wb, data = boot::bigcity, sheet = targetSheet)

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

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

# Determine high growth cities
growth <- boot::bigcity$x / boot::bigcity$u
# value is for upper quartile
rowIdx <- which(growth >= 1.4410)

# 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(boot::bigcity)),
             col = rep_len(seq_len(ncol(boot::bigcity)), length(rowIdx)),
             cellstyle = highGrowthStyle)

# 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).