How to Automate Excel with R
Written by Matt Dancho

Your company lives off them… Excel files. Why not automate them & save some time? Here’s an Excel File you’re going to make in this tutorial from R. Let me show you how to automate Excel with R in under 5-minutes, using openxlsx
and tidyquant
.

Automating Excel from R
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R-Tips Weekly
This article is part of R-Tips Weekly, a weekly video tutorial that shows you step-by-step how to do common R coding tasks. Pretty cool, right?
Here are the links to get set up. 👇
Video Tutorial
I have a companion video tutorial that shows even more cool automation stuff (plus mistakes to avoid).
Automate Excel with R Tutorial
Here’s an Excel File you’re going to make in this tutorial from R. 👇

Step 1: Collect, Prepare Data & Plots
First, collect your data using tidyquant
, an awesome package for importing & working with Financial Data.

Get the code.
Pivot Table Data
The previous code makes this Pivot Table (stock returns by year and symbol).

Here’s the stock performance plot from the previous code.

Step 2: Automate R to Excel
Now for the magic - Let’s add the Pivot Table & Stock Plot to Excel! 🔥
- Initialize a workbook
- Create a worksheet
- Add the stock plot
- Add the Pivot Table
- Save the workbook
- Open the workbook (programmatically)

Get the code.
Excel Output (.xlsx)
You’ve just automated creation of an Excel Workbook with R.

💡 Conclusions
You learned how to use the openxlsx
library to create automated reports using R and Excel together. Great work! But, there’s a lot more to becoming a Business Scientist.
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