Reading Microsoft Excel files into R in Ubuntu 12.04

People still send data around in Microsoft Excel format: xlsx. In order to import xlsx data into R, one can use the xlsx package. When I tried to install the package in R, I ran into libjvm.so not found error.

 libjvm.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

There is a stackoverflow thread on this.

After xlsx package was installed properly, the launched jvm did not have enough memory. The way to allow more memory to the jvm. This stackoverflow thread explains how to do this.

For example, to allocate 2GB memory for the jvm instance,

options(java.parameters = "-Xmx2000m")

DONE!