Read excel file with formulas in cells into R

Question

I was trying to read an excel spreadsheet into R data frame. However, some of the columns have formulas or are linked to other external spreadsheets. Whenever I read the spreadsheet into R, there are always many cells becomes NA. Is there a good way to fix this problem so that I can get the original value of those cells?

The R script I used to do the import is like the following:

options(java.parameters = "-Xmx8g")
library(XLConnect)
# Step 1 import the "raw" tab
path_cost = "..."
wb = loadWorkbook(...)
raw = readWorksheet(wb, sheet = '...', header = TRUE, useCachedValues = FALSE)

Answer 1

UPDATE: read_excel from the readxl package looks like a better solution. It's very fast (0.14 sec in the 1400 x 6 file I mentioned in the comments) and it evaluates formulas before import. It doesn't use java, so no need to set any java options.

 # sheet can be a string (name of sheet) or integer (position of sheet)
 raw = read_excel(file, sheet=sheet)

For more information and examples, see the short vignette.

ORIGINAL ANSWER: Try read.xlsx from the xlsx package. The help file implies that by default it evaluates formulas before importing (see the keepFormulas parameter). I checked this on a small test file and it worked for me. Formula results were imported correctly, including formulas that depend on other sheets in the same workbook and formulas that depend on other workbooks in the same directory.

One caveat: If an externally linked sheet has changed since the last time you updated the links on the file you're reading into R, then any values read into R that depend on external links will be the old values, not the latest ones.

The code in your case would be:

library(xlsx)

options(java.parameters = "-Xmx8g") # xlsx also uses java

# Replace file and sheetName with appropriate values for your file
# keepFormulas=FALSE and header=TRUE are the defaults. I added them only for illustration.
raw = read.xlsx(file, sheetName=sheetName, header=TRUE, keepFormulas=FALSE)