Ling, If any column has text with spaces between words, this will lead to the "more columns ..." problem. Delete the spaces and try again.
e.g., if the Excel file is Var1 Var2 Var3 text 1 2 more text 3 4 yet more 5 6 and more 7 8 blahblah 9 10 On a Mac, this will lead to the error message "Error in scan(file = file, what = what, sep = sep, quote = quote, dec = dec, : line 1 did not have 4 elements" (which I believe is the equivalent message to what you are getting on a PC) But, if your remove the blanks in column 1, this reads as > x <- read.table("test.txt",header=T) > x Var1 Var2 Var3 1 text 1 2 2 moretext 3 4 3 yetmore 5 6 4 andmore 7 8 5 blahblah 9 10 with no error message. Alternatively, for small files, if using a PC try copying the Excel spreadsheet to your clipboard and x <- read.table(file("clipboard"), header = TRUE) or, if using a Mac x <- read.table(pipe("pbpaste"), header = TRUE) Bill At 8:38 PM -0400 6/22/05, Wensui Liu wrote: >Ling, > >You might take a look at the function read.xls() in gdata library. > >HTH. > > >On 6/22/05, Ling Jin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> Hi all, >> >> Does anybody know the easiest way to import excel data into R? I copied >> and pasted the excel data into a txt file, and tried read.table, but R >> reported that >> >> Error in read.table("data_support.txt", sep = " ", header = T) : >> more columns than column names >> >> Thanks! >> > > Ling >> -- William Revelle http://pmc.psych.northwestern.edu/revelle.html Professor http://personality-project.org/personality.html Department of Psychology http://www.wcas.northwestern.edu/psych/ Northwestern University http://www.northwestern.edu/ ______________________________________________ R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html