How to prevent converting numbers into scientific form while importing excel files in R?

Question

Using Openxlsx package and read.xlsx function. It reads the data but converts numbers into scientific form.

The number is 132178278. It gets converted to 132178278E8.

Tried using the read.xlsx function from xlsx package. But it takes too long to read the file when compared to using openxlsx.

It might be a printing format not a conversion. does this solve your problem ? https://datakwery.com/post/2020-07-11-scientific-notation-in-r/ — Arnaud Feldmann, Dec 01 '20 at 10:05
I am going to match the number with another column of a dataframe. — amerakhtab, Dec 01 '20 at 10:18
options(scipen=999) doesn't seem to work in this case. I need the exact number. If I could read it as a character that would do. — amerakhtab, Dec 01 '20 at 10:20
@Luiy_coder This is an identification number. I am going to use this to match with another list of numbers. — amerakhtab, Dec 01 '20 at 10:39
Check this out. It's a similar case as yours [https://superuser.com/questions/861964/how-do-i-stop-excel-from-converting-value-0503e000-to-5-03e02-automatically]. Open your excel and see if the numbers are formatted there. — Luiy_coder, Dec 01 '20 at 11:34

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 15 '23 at 21:28

Before attempting this, first set:

options(scipen=999)

After reading the Workbook in openxlsx and storing it in a dataframe, just convert the column with scientific notation to Numeric, as it may be treating it as a Character.

as.numeric(df$`Column in Scientific Notation`)

How to prevent converting numbers into scientific form while importing excel files in R?

1 Answers1