Hi Everybody I have started to learn how to use the XLConnect package and I think it is going to be very helpful to help me to operate between Excel users. Is there a function that can export a dataframe to a Excel sheet and automatically create a named region for every column (excluding the column heading) that correspond to the column name? If this is possible one can then also create formulae from R that will just work when opened in Excel without having to figure out the indices in Excel I have figured out how to do that individually for each column but would lie to automate the process library(XLConnect) wb <- loadWorkbook("Testdata.xlsx", create = TRUE) # create a workbook testdata=expand.grid(letters[1:10], 1:10) # create some data createSheet(wb,"testdata") # create sheet writeWorksheet(wb,testdata,sheet="testdata") # write data to sheet # Create named regions named the column names col1idx=idx2cref(c(2,grep("Var1",names(testdata)), 1+length(testdata$Var1), grep("Var1",names(testdata)))) # addres1=paste(col1idx[[1]],":",col1idx[[2]],sep="") createName(wb,name="Var1",formula=paste("testdata!",addres1,sep="")) # repeat for column 2 col2idx=idx2cref(c(2,grep("Var2",names(testdata)), 1+length(testdata$Var2), grep("Var2",names(testdata)))) addres2=paste(col2idx[[1]],":",col2idx[[2]],sep="") createName(wb,name="Var2",formula=paste("testdata!",addres2,sep="")) createSheet(wb,"results") # a place to test if the named regions can be used within excel ave="=AVERAGE(Var2)" som="=Sum(Var2)" writeWorksheet(wb, data.frame(ave), sheet = "results", startRow = 2, startCol = 2) writeWorksheet(wb, data.frame(som), sheet = "results", startRow = 4, startCol = 2) saveWorkbook(wb) What I need is: 1. a function to repeat this process of naming the regions over 169 columns, and 2. that the excel formulas in sheet "results" really work. (I found that if you find and replace "=" with "=" in Excel it make all the formulas work, maybe there is a more elegant way from within R.) Does anybody have any advice? Thanks in advance Christiaan ___________________ sessionInfo() R version 2.11.1 (2010-05-31) x86_64-apple-darwin9.8.0 locale: [1] en_US/en_US/en_US/C/en_US/en_US attached base packages: [1] splines grid stats graphics grDevices utils datasets methods base other attached packages: [1] Hmisc_3.8-0 survival_2.35-8 XLConnect_0.1-4 XLConnectJars_0.1-1 rJava_0.8-4 vcd_1.2-9 [7] colorspace_1.1-0 MASS_7.3-6 loaded via a namespace (and not attached): [1] cluster_1.12.3 lattice_0.18-8 tools_2.11.1 [[alternative HTML version deleted]]