read.xls - read in variable-length list of sheets, with their names

Question

Given several .xls files with varying number of sheets, I am reading them into R usingread.xls from the gdata package. I

Answer 1

See the sheetCount and sheetNames functions (on same help page) in gdata. If xls <- "a.xls", say, then reading all sheets of a spreadsheet into a list, one sheet per component, is just this:

sapply(sheetNames(xls), read.xls, xls = xls, simplify = FALSE)

Note that the components will be named using the names of the sheets. Depending on the content it might make sense to remove simplify = FALSE.