Reading Excel data is easy with JGR and XLConnect
From the post:
Despite the fact that Excel is the most widespread application for data manipulation and (perhaps) analysis, R’s support for the xls and xlsx file formats has left a lot to be desired. Fortunately, the XLConnect package has been created to fill this void, and now JGR 1.7-8 includes integration with XLConnect package to load .xls and .xlsx documents into R.
For JGR, see: http://rforge.net/JGR/