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

Performance is a bit better than openxlsx implementation:

library(microbenchmark)
library(nycflights13)
microbenchmark(
  writexl = writexl::write_xlsx(flights, tempfile()),
  openxlsx = openxlsx::write.xlsx(flights, tempfile()),
  times = 5
)
## Unit: seconds
##      expr       min        lq      mean    median        uq       max neval
##   writexl  8.884712  8.904431  9.103419  8.965643  9.041565  9.720743     5
##  openxlsx 17.166818 18.072527 19.171003 18.669805 18.756661 23.189206     5

Also the output xlsx files are smaller:

writexl::write_xlsx(flights, tmp1 <- tempfile())
file.info(tmp1)$size
## 29157282

openxlsx::write.xlsx(flights, tmp2 <- tempfile())
file.info(tmp2)$size
## 35962067