readxl

The readxl package imports Excel data into R, supporting both .xls and .xlsx formats. It reads tabular data from Excel files without requiring external dependencies like Java or Perl, making it easy to install across all operating systems.

The package automatically handles common Excel quirks like date specifications (Windows 1900 and Mac 1904), re-encodes non-ASCII characters to UTF-8, and detects the minimal data rectangle to import. Users can control which cells to read through flexible range specification, skip rows, limit the number of rows read, and customize column names and types. Returns are tibbles for better integration with tidyverse workflows.