How to Create Multiple Sheets in Excel workbook Using R

Last Updated : 26 Apr, 2025

In this article, we will discuss how to create multiple sheets in an excel file using the xlsx package. As we all know in general an excel file might contain one or more than one sheet present in it.

Manually we can create and insert data into multiple sheets in Excel GUI Application but when it comes to R Programming by default the data is inserted into Sheet1 but we can also modify it.

This can be achieved by specifying the sheet names in the write.xlsx() function where we want to insert data.

Syntax: write.xlsx(df, file, sheetName, col.names, row.names, append, showNA, password)

where,

df – data frame to be converted
file – the path to the output excel file is specified here
sheetName – to string is passed as sheet name
col.names – logical value indicating if the column names of the data frame are to be written in the file
row.names – logical value indicating if the column names of the data frame are to be written in the file
append – when one wants to append the data to an existing file then this value needs to be marked as TRUE
showNA- If TRUE NA(Null) Will be shown otherwise will leave as empty cells in the excel sheet

Importing Libraries

In this article, we will be requiring xlsx package to create the dataset.

R

# install the xlsx package 
install.packages("xlsx") 
# load the package into working environment 
library(xlsx)

Creating dataset and writing in Excel File

In this step we will add as many dataset we want and write them in the excel file. We just need to change the sheetname and it will be done.

R

# Creation of a sample data frame 
df1<-data.frame( 
  stu_id=c(1,2,NA,4,5,6,NA,8,9,10), 
  stud_name=c('Abhi','Bhuvan','Cherry','Don', 
              'Eshwar','Firoz',NA,'Kiran',NA,'Zaheer'), 
  age=c(12,13,NA,15,16,NA,NA,12,14,12) 
) 
# Writing the data frame into an excel file including NULL(NA) values 
xlsx::write.xlsx(df1,"C:\\Users\\Downloads\\Multiple_excel.xlsx", 
                 sheetName="Sheet1", 
                 col.names = TRUE,showNA=TRUE,append=TRUE) 

Now we can add one more data frame in the excel file.

R

# Creation of another sample data frame 
df2 <- data.frame(Roll_Number = c(1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10), 
                         Age= c(18,19,20,19,18,17,18,19,17,16), 
                         Marks  = c(98,96,89,90,75,35,88,92,78,94)) 
    
# Inserting another data frame in another sheet of excel file 
xlsx::write.xlsx(df2,"C:\\Users\\Downloads\\Multiple_excel.xlsx", 
                 sheetName="Sheet2", 
                 col.names=TRUE,append=TRUE)