Can R identify if the Excel file has commented cells?

Question

I have an excel sheet .xlsx, which have some commented cells in it. After importing it in R, is there any way by which R can identify the commented cells?

Because I have to use some if else conditions only to the commented cells.

Answer 1

Let's say we have this file, test.xlsx:

Using openxlsx we can read the workbook as a dataframe object to extract only data:

library(openxlsx)

# read the data
df1 <- read.xlsx("test.xlsx")
df1
#    1  no
# 1  2 yes
# 2  3  no
# 3  5  no
# 4 10 yes

If we need to extract comments, we need to read as workbook object:

# read as workbook object
wb <- loadWorkbook("test.xlsx")

Check the structure of the object to see where the cell reference is stored:

str(wb$comments)
# List of 3
# $ :List of 2
# ..$ :List of 5
# .. ..$ ref       : chr "B2"
# ...
# ... etc

Then subset, loop through sheets, and subset cell reference with comments:

lapply(wb$comments, function(sheet)
  sapply(sheet, "[[", "ref"))
# [[1]]
# [1] "B2" "B5"
# 
# [[2]]
# list()
# 
# [[3]]
# list()

This means there are 3 sheets, 1st sheet has 2 comments at B2 and B5, other 2 sheets are blank.