I do my statistical work in R and need to share datasets with my team through Google Sheets. I want to know if there are any R libraries that make it easy to read data from Google Sheets into a data frame and also write R data frames back to Google Sheets. I tried looking around but got confused by all the different options. Has anyone found a straightforward way to do this? Also curious if there are better alternatives in Python or other programming languages that might be worth switching to for this specific task.
I’ve used googlesheets4 for two years now - it’s perfect for this workflow. Auth setup is smooth after the first time when you authorize your Google account. After that, it remembers your credentials. read_sheet() pulls data into R dataframes reliably, and write_sheet() pushes it back without problems. Pro tip: make sure your sheet columns have consistent data types before importing or you’ll get weird parsing issues. It handles dates, numbers, and most standard formats just fine. Haven’t found any reason to switch to Python since this covers everything I need and works great with my existing R setup.
gsheets is another solid option if you want something simpler than googlesheets4. Fewer features but way easier setup - just need the sheet URL and you’re good to go. I’ve been using it for quick data pulls and it rarely breaks on me.