R – Easy way to export multiple data.frame to multiple Excel worksheets

excelrxlsx

I am surprised to find that there is no easy way to export multiple data.frame to multiple worksheets of an Excel file? I tried xlsx package, seems it can only write to one sheet (override old sheet); I also tried WriteXLS package, but it gives me error all the time…

My code structure is like this: by design, for each iteration, the output dataframe (tempTable) and the sheetName (sn) got updated and exported into one tab. 

for (i in 2 : ncol(code)){ 
        ...
        tempTable <- ...
        sn <- ...
        WriteXLS("tempTable", ExcelFileName = "C:/R_code/../file.xlsx",
              SheetNames = sn);
}

I can export to several cvs files, but there has to be an easy way to do that in Excel, right?

Best Answer

You can write to multiple sheets with the xlsx package. You just need to use a different sheetName for each data frame and you need to add append=TRUE:

library(xlsx)
write.xlsx(dataframe1, file="filename.xlsx", sheetName="sheet1", row.names=FALSE)
write.xlsx(dataframe2, file="filename.xlsx", sheetName="sheet2", append=TRUE, row.names=FALSE)

Another option, one that gives you more control over formatting and where the data frame is placed, is to do everything within R/xlsx code and then save the workbook at the end. For example:

wb = createWorkbook()

sheet = createSheet(wb, "Sheet 1")

addDataFrame(dataframe1, sheet=sheet, startColumn=1, row.names=FALSE)
addDataFrame(dataframe2, sheet=sheet, startColumn=10, row.names=FALSE)

sheet = createSheet(wb, "Sheet 2")

addDataFrame(dataframe3, sheet=sheet, startColumn=1, row.names=FALSE)

saveWorkbook(wb, "My_File.xlsx")

In case you might find it useful, here are some interesting helper functions that make it easier to add formatting, metadata, and other features to spreadsheets using xlsx: http://www.sthda.com/english/wiki/r2excel-read-write-and-format-easily-excel-files-using-r-software

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