Download Google Sheets Using Just the URL

Simple package to download Google Sheets using just the sharing link. Spreadsheets can be downloaded as a data frame, or as plain text to parse manually. Google Sheets is the new name for Google Docs Spreadsheets < https://www.google.com/sheets/about>.

gsheet

gsheet is a simple package to download [Google Sheets](https://www.google.com/sheets/about/ (aka Google Docs Spreadsheets) using just the sharing link. Sheets can be downloaded as a data frame, or as plain text to parse manually.

Installation

Install from CRAN with:

install.packages('gsheet')

Or install the latest development version from github with:

devtools::install_github("maxconway/gsheet")

Getting started

Download a google sheet as a table with:

library(gsheet)
gsheet2tbl('docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1I9mJsS5QnXF2TNNntTy-HrcdHmIF9wJ8ONYvEJTXSNo')

Advanced

More control

If you want more control, you might want to use something like:

url <- 'docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1I9mJsS5QnXF2TNNntTy-HrcdHmIF9wJ8ONYvEJTXSNo'
a <- gsheet2text(url, format='csv')
b <- read.csv(a, stringsAsFactors=FALSE)

This way the table can be cleaned before parsing, and different options can be used in parsing.

Downloading other sheets

If you want to download a sheet other than the first, you have to use the direct url, copied from the address bar, like so:

url <- 'docs.google.com/spreadsheets/1I9mJsS5QnXF2TNNntTy-HrcdHmIF9wJ8ONYvEJTXSNo#gid=850032961'
b <- gsheet2tbl(url)

This works because this makes the gid, which is the sheet identifier, available. If you have problems downloading the first sheet, this can also help too.