Embed RData in Excel spreadsheet?

Question

I'm building an RShiny app where a user modifies a dataset step-by-step. At any point, they can download their dataset as an .xlsx file, and an RData file containing all the parameterization of the tool up to that point. Right now, they have to click on separate buttons and specify separate paths to save the .xlsx file and the RData files.

Ideally, I would like to have both files stored in the same place at the same time, from a single button click. Rather than writing a separate RData file, I was thinking I could write the contents of the RData file to a particular cell in the .xlsx document, and read this serialized data back the next time the user loads the spreadsheet. Is this possible?

Answer 1

Embedding a binary RData in an Excel cell sounds...ummm...yeah, I wouldn't.

Possible Solutions:

• make a zip file of both, then one-click downloads it all and its the user's job to extract the parts.
• save everything into a single .rds file as a single object, likely a list constructed something like list(params=parameters, data=dataframe)
• save the parameters to a second sheet in the Excel file, name in column 1, value in column 2 or however is suitable. This might be a suitable format if you expect the user to tweak the data in Excel and then re-upload it to your application.