R has some good tools for importing data from spreadsheets, among them the readxl package for Excel and the googlesheets package for Google Sheets. But these only work well when the data in the spreadsheet are arranged as a rectangular table, and not overly encumbered with formatting or generated with formulas. As Jenny Bryan pointed out in her recent talk at the useR!2016 conference (and embedded below, or download PDF slides here), in practice few spreadsheets have "a clean little rectangle of data in the upper-left corner", because most people use spreadsheets not just a file format for data retrieval,...