Import of several worksheets of an Excel workbook

Question

I am relatively new to R and try to use some specific benefits of this program in my professional area. Now I need to load only several worksheets of a workbook into R and to apply a function to these several worksheets. I learned how to load and apply the function to all sheets. My script looks like:

wb <- loadWorkbook(filename = "book.xlsx")
lst <- readWorksheet(wb, sheet = getSheets(wb))
lapply(lst, function(w) { w <- summary(w[1:5]); w })

How can I modify this code in order to apply the function only to several worksheets, not to all?

Answer 1

Simply subset your list by indexed numbers or names in brackets. For instance, let's say the 1st, 3rd, 5th worksheets are the ones you need to run through function:

# FOR NAMED OR UNNAMED LIST
sublst <- lst[c(1,3,5)]

# FOR NAMED LIST
sublst <- lst[c("Sheet1", "Sheet3", "Sheet5")]

outputlst <- lapply(sublst,  function(w) ...)

Or specify the subsets of sheets during import:

sublst <- readWorksheet(wb, sheet = c("Sheet1", "Sheet3", "Sheet5"))

outputlst <- lapply(sublst,  function(w) ...)