Francis Tsiboe, Agricultural Risk Policy Center, North Dakota State University, Fargo, ND 58102
Acknowledgment: This package grew out of workflow needs to bridge Excel RTD/data add-ins (e.g., DTN ProphetX, Bloomberg) with reproducible R pipelines on Windows.
Abstract: rexcelbridge provides vendor-neutral helpers to
execute Excel formulas from R via COM automation. It supports
single-cell and spilled-array results and includes a pluggable
“readiness” predicate to treat transient add-in states (e.g., “Wait”,
“Loading…”) as not yet ready. This enables scripted retrieval of
market/pricing and other plugin-delivered data directly into R, while
keeping provider logic inside Excel.
Keywords: Excel COM; RTD; Bloomberg; ProphetX; automation; Windows
- Windows + Microsoft Excel installed
- Matching bitness: R and Office must both be 64-bit or both 32-bit
- Appropriate Excel add-ins installed/enabled (e.g., Bloomberg, ProphetX) if you use their formulas
- An interactive desktop session (RTD often won’t refresh under headless services)
# install from a local folder during development
devtools::install_github("ftsiboe/rexcelbridge",force = TRUE,upgrade = "never")Plain Excel (no vendor add-in needed):
library(RDCOMClient)
rb_eval_single("=SUM(2,3,5)", visible = TRUE)Questions, suggestions, collaborations: Francis Tsiboe — ftsiboe@hotmail.com