There are several R packages that can read data and cell formatting from Excel, several packages that focus on writing Excel sheets with data and (sometimes) formatting, and some packages that do both. This blog post is a bit old, but it covers the major roundtrip contenders. There's a fairly exhaustive list here, as well.
tidyxl can be helpful for analyzing the structure and formatting of an Excel spreadsheet, though its focus is not on round-trip read/write:
Importing and then exporting always carries the risk of losing something, but only you will be able to tell how big of a problem this might be based on the complexity of the spreadsheets you are working with.
If you want help with this, you'll need to provide more information on what happened when you tried to install. Since package installation trouble is wandering away from the original question, that would probably be best put in its own topic, with a link here.