Export data into specific cells in Excel sheet

Question

I need to export a data frame in R to an Excel sheet, which can be done via:

require("xlsx")
write.xlsx(x, file, sheetName="Sheet1", col.names=TRUE, 
    row.names=TRUE, append=FALSE, showNA=TRUE)

My exported data will then be pasted beginning in cell "A1" of the Excel sheet. I can also set append=TRUE so the data will be added at the end of the sheet.

Is there a possibility to put it into a specific cell? I need to export the data frame to a range beginning at cell C10. Is this possible?

Update: The sheet contains data in rows 1-9 as well as columns A-B. Therefore it is not possible to just add empty cells to the data frame and paste it into the excel sheet, because those empty cells would erase the data.

Answer 1

You can do it with the package XLConnect.

library(XLConnect)
wb <- loadWorkbook("File_result.xlsx"), create = TRUE)
createSheet(wb, name = "Sheet1")

# here, you can set the startRow and startCol. Col A = 1, B = 2,...
writeWorksheet(wb,x,"Sheet1",startRow = 10, startCol = 3, header = TRUE)

# automatically adjust column width
setColumnWidth(wb, sheet = "Sheet1", column = 3:4, width = -1)
saveWorkbook(wb)

Answer 2

You can fill the empty cells with empty data:

data <- matrix(1:100, ncol=5)
col.offset <- 2
row.offset <- 9
emptycols <- matrix("", ncol=col.offset, nrow=nrow(data))
data <- cbind(emptycols, data)
emptyrows <- matrix("", nrow=row.offset, ncol=ncol(data))
data <- rbind(emptyrows, data)
write.table(data, "test.csv", row.names=FALSE, col.names=FALSE)

Or, if you want to keep the original data:

data <- matrix(1:100, ncol=5)
col.offset <- 2
row.offset <- 9
orig.data <- as.matrix(read.csv("test.csv", header=FALSE, stringsAsFactors=FALSE))
orig.cols <- orig.data[1:nrow(data), 1:col.offset]
data <- cbind(orig.cols, data)
orig.rows <- orig.data[1:row.offset, 1:ncol(data)]
data <- rbind(orig.rows, data)