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  3. Importing Data in R (Part 1)
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Exercise

The skip argument

Another argument that can be very useful when reading in Excel files that are less tidy, is skip. With skip, you can tell R to ignore a specified number of rows inside the Excel sheets you're trying to pull data from. Have a look at this example:

read_excel("data.xlsx", skip = 15)

In this case, the first 15 rows in the first sheet of "data.xlsx" are ignored.

If the first row of this sheet contained the column names, this information will also be ignored by readxl. Make sure to set col_names to FALSE or manually specify column names in this case!

The file urbanpop.xlsx is available in your directory; it has column names in the first rows.

Instructions

100 XP
  • Import the second sheet of "urbanpop.xlsx", but skip the first 21 rows. Make sure to set col_names = FALSE. Store the resulting data frame in a variable urbanpop_sel.
  • Select the first observation from urbanpop_sel and print it out.