R Copying to and Reading from csv Files

Question

When I go to save Excel data that I've pasted into a .csv file, I get a formatting issue and often the saved file has all the numbers in each row as one long string.

My read statement is

resids<-read.csv("C:\\Projects\residuals_Parts3.csv",header=TRUE)

Any ideas on how to fix this?

Answer 1

The warning you are getting is fairly standard in Excel - any formatting you've added to the file (eg widening columns) will get lost if you don't save the file as an excel file.. and the warning is supposed to remind you of this. Personally, the extra click or two annoys me too.

If you would like to avoid converting excel files to CSV before bringing them into R, try the openxls package. It's saved me from a lot of that monkey business.