SOF newbie here, so please bear with me and some daft questions!
Can anyone please tell me what the most efficient way would be to read in ~50+ excel files with multiple tabs into R, select a specific tab from all 50, and combine those tabs by date to create a large dataframe?
For example, let's assume I want to see what GP activity has been like in a specific healthcare region here in the UK for the last 4 years. I currently have to download many many monthly reports like this one Appointments in General Practice, March 2022
I then have to go to table 3a, scroll down to the NHS area code "07k", and then paste the activity from that row into a separate excel sheet.
I have to do this a lot, and it takes hours, but am not coding literate enough to figure out a better way of doing this.
From the guidance of others, my attempts to date have involved downloading many months' data to a desktop folder. I set my working drive to that folder, and then attempt the following:
files <- list.files(pattern = "*.xls", full.names = TRUE)
for(i in files){
filepath <- file.path("C:/Users/myname/Desktop/recordsfolder", i)
assign(i, readxl::read_xls(file path))
}
But the honest truth is I don't really understand this, nor what the next step would be.
If anyone could point me in a better direction I'd be very grateful.