From the post:
Mirai Solutions GmbH (http://www.mirai-solutions.com) is very pleased to announce the release of XLConnect 0.2-0, which can be found at CRAN.
As one of the updates, XLConnect has moved to the newest release of Apache POI: 3.8. Also, the lazy evaluation issues with S4 generics are now fixed: generic methods now fully expand the argument list in order to have the arguments immediately evaluated.
Furthermore, we have added an XLConnect.R script file to the top level library directory, which contains all code examples presented in the vignette, so that it’s easier to reuse the code.
From an earlier description of XLConnect:
XLConnect is a comprehensive and platform-independent R package for manipulating Microsoft Excel files from within R. XLConnect differs from other related R packages in that it is completely cross-platform and as such runs under Windows, Unix/Linux and Mac (32- and 64-bit). Moreover, it does not require any installation of Microsoft Excel or any other special drivers to be able to read & write Excel files. The only requirement is a recent version of a Java Runtime Environment (JRE). Also, XLConnect can deal with the old *.xls (BIFF) and the new *.xlsx (Office Open XML) file formats. Under the hood, XLConnect uses Apache POI (http://poi.apache.org) – a Java API to manipulate Microsoft Office documents. (From XLConnect – A platform-independent interface to Excel
If you work with data in a business environment, you are going to encounter Excel files. (Assuming you are not in a barter economy counting animal skins and dried fish.)
And customers are going to want you to return Excel files to them. (Yes, yes, topic maps would be a much better delivery format. But if the choice is Excel files, you get paid, topic maps files, you don’t get paid, which one would you do? That’s what I thought.)
A package to consider if you need to manipulate Excel files from within R.