In southwick-associates/workflow: Streamline Project Workflows

knitr::opts_chunk$set(
  collapse = TRUE,
  comment = "#>"
)

Overview

The workflow package includes convenience functions for writing to Excel. This can be helpful for packaging multiple results (e.g., spending profiles) into a single file for easily sharing with colleagues. It uses package openxlsx.

Initializing a Workbook

The first step is to create an Excel workbook using xlsx_initialize_workbook(). This makes an Excel file with a single "README" tab. I recommend always including a README for documentation (to be edited manually in Excel).

library(workflow)

xlsx_initialize_workbook("tmp.xlsx")
openxlsx::getSheetNames("tmp.xlsx")

Adding Results

R data frames can be written directly to an Excel file with xlsx_write_table():

# create some data
poem <- data.frame(verse = "All that is gold does not glitter", stringsAsFactors = FALSE)

xlsx_write_table(poem, "tmp.xlsx")
openxlsx::getSheetNames("tmp.xlsx")

Updating Results

Additional calls to xlsx_write_table() will simply overwrite tabs with the same name, so you can easily update results. This does imply that you shouldn't manually edit the Excel file (other than the README tab).

# modify data of interest
poem[2, ] <- "Not all those who wander are lost"

xlsx_write_table(poem, "tmp.xlsx")
openxlsx::readWorkbook("tmp.xlsx", "poem")