writexl

Portable, light-weight data frame to xlsx exporter based on libxlsxwriter. No Java or Excel required.

Wraps the libxlsxwriter library to create files in Microsoft Excel ‘xlsx’ format.

Installation

install.packages("writexl")

Getting started

Currently the package only has write_xlsx() to export a data frame to xlsx.

library(writexl)
library(readxl)
tmp <- writexl::write_xlsx(iris)
readxl::read_xlsx(tmp)

# A tibble: 150 x 5
   Sepal.Length Sepal.Width Petal.Length Petal.Width Species
          <dbl>       <dbl>        <dbl>       <dbl>   <chr>
 1          5.1         3.5          1.4         0.2  setosa
 2          4.9         3.0          1.4         0.2  setosa
 3          4.7         3.2          1.3         0.2  setosa
 4          4.6         3.1          1.5         0.2  setosa
 5          5.0         3.6          1.4         0.2  setosa
 6          5.4         3.9          1.7         0.4  setosa
 7          4.6         3.4          1.4         0.3  setosa
 8          5.0         3.4          1.5         0.2  setosa
 9          4.4         2.9          1.4         0.2  setosa
10          4.9         3.1          1.5         0.1  setosa
# ... with 140 more rows

Most data types should roundtrip with readxl:

library(nycflights13)
out <- readxl::read_xlsx(writexl::write_xlsx(flights))
all.equal(out, flights)
## TRUE

File writing time is faster than the openxlsx2 implementation:

library(microbenchmark)
library(nycflights13)
microbenchmark(
  writexl = writexl::write_xlsx(flights, tempfile()),
  openxlsx2 = openxlsx2::write_xlsx(flights, tempfile()),
  times = 5
)
# Unit: seconds
#      expr       min       lq     mean   median       uq      max neval
#   writexl  8.297612 11.38129 12.19547 13.13240 13.92596 14.24009     5
# openxlsx2 31.840446 33.25751 50.86460 52.04899 64.36513 72.81091     5

The output xlsx files are similarly sized:

writexl::write_xlsx(flights, tmp1 <- tempfile())
file.info(tmp1)$size
# 29139353

openxlsx2::write_xlsx(flights, tmp2 <- tempfile())
file.info(tmp2)$size
# 29296990