Reading in merged cells - need to know number of columns they span

[lindsayplatt]

I am trying to read excel files that have merged cells as column names. In the example below, there is no way to determine that Merged Column Name applies to only Column Name 1 and Column Name 2, or that Column name 2 corresponds to two columns of content.

It would be helpful if read_excel could give information about the number of rows/columns that merged cells span.

In Excel:

Merged Column Name
Column Name 1	Column Name 2		Column Name 3	Column Name 3
Content	Content	Content	Content	Content

Data frame in R looks like:

Merged Column Name	NA	NA	NA	NA
Column Name 1	Column Name 2	NA	Column Name 3	Column Name 3
Content	Content	Content	Content	Content

[jennybc]

Is this the sort of R data frame you would expect in this case (I'm assuming you did not mean to repeat Column Name 3):

Merged Column Name	Merged Column Name	Merged Column Name	something	else
Column Name 1	Column Name 2	Column Name 2	Column Name 3	Column Name 4
Content	Content	Content	Content	Content

Or maybe this?

MCN.1	MCN.2a	MCN.2b	something	else
Content	Content	Content	Content	Content

In any case, you might also be interested in the TableToLongForm package:

https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/TableToLongForm/index.html
https://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~joh024/Research/TableToLongForm/
https://journal.r-project.org/archive/2014-2/oh.pdf

[burchill]

I've made a pull request that has the behavior of the first example @jennybc gave: #220
However, be warned: column names that have the same name are a pain in the but.

[jennybc]

As discussed in #220 and above, it's best to handle these problems via other packages. There are no near term plans to get into merged cell issues here.