Importing from Excel

[smbryant6]

To import a file from Excel, I installed readxl, and got this error message:

install.packages("readxl")
WARNING: Rtools is required to build R packages but is not currently installed. Please download and install the appropriate version of Rtools before proceeding: RTools: Toolchains for building R and R packages from source on Windows
Installing package into ‘C:/Users/suzette/Documents/R/win-library/4.0’
(as ‘lib’ is unspecified)
trying URL 'https://cran.rstudio.com/bin/windows/contrib/4.0/readxl_1.3.1.zip'
Content type 'application/zip' length 1708988 bytes (1.6 MB)
downloaded 1.6 MB
package ‘readxl’ successfully unpacked and MD5 sums checked

It says I need to download Rtools, but then readxl successfully installed and allowed me to import my spreadsheet. Is Rtools not actually required for installing readxl? If not, what is Rtools used for?

[cderv]

@smbryant6

Is Rtools not actually required for installing readxl? If not, what is Rtools used for?

Rtools is required to build R package from source. CRAN offers windows binaries (in .zip file) so you did not need that here. But if you want to install archive version as source, or development version (on github or locally) you may need Rtools.

You can install it from CRAN (not an R package!)
https://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/Rtools/

[smbryant6]

Thank you for the very quick reply!