We've covered how to enter new data directly into Deducer, but what if your data has been entered in another program, like Excel? How can you get the data from that file into Deducer?

The 'XLConnect' package

R can open most Excel spreadsheets using a package called 'XLConnect'. To see if you can do this, press Ctrl+L (or select Load Data from the menu), navigate to the Excel file you want to open, and select it. If you do not have XLConnect installed, you should see a prompt asking if you want to install XLConnect. Click OK. Once you have it installed, a prompt will appear asking which spreadsheet within the file you want to open. The default is set to 1, the first spreadsheet.

If XLConnect isn't working, you can save the file as CSV.

Google Spreadsheets? You can use the same strategy for Google Spreadsheets that you used for Excel: Download the file in CSV format and then open it.

Stats Homework 1, Part B: Accessing data that was originally in an Excel file.

Here is the link to an Excel file containing people's answers to the "Attitudes Toward Women Scale" (AWS):

aws.xls

Open the file either directly in R using XLConnect or by first saving it as .csv. (Troubleshooting note: If your file is aws.csv.xlsx, review the instructions above on how to Save as type: CSV.)

For Part B of your homework, run Descriptive Statistics on the 15 items of the AWS and then answer the questions on this Google Form.