On Apr 18, 2007, at 1:58PM , Gabor Csardi wrote:

> On Wed, Apr 18, 2007 at 03:51:35PM -0200, Alberto Monteiro wrote:
>> Gabor Csardi wrote:
>> Ok, but who would be insane enough to use Excel in Linux or Mac? :-)

The original reason for read.xls() was to allow a web application
running computations through R to handle data in the format the
_user_ preferred. Like it or not, most scientists store their
experimental data in MS-Excel spreadsheets, and one needs to be able
to handle them.... It turned out to be a lot easier to write a
function for R to read in XLS data than to train our users to convert
their data to .csv format.

-G
(author of the gdata package)

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