title: Efficient way of exporting large R dataset to excel
body: <p>As title, I have a dataset with about 13000 rows and 255 columns (actually I have more than 255 columns but <code>RODBC</code> package seems to limit the number of columns exported to 255, so I trimmed it a bit) that need to be exported to xls/xlsx file.</p>
  
  <p>I tried <code>RODBC</code> and <code>xlsx</code> package, both takes more than 5 minutes for export. I wonder if there is any other more efficient way of doing this?</p>
  
  <p>I knew a little bit of python (using python to connect to outlook for listing emails in mailbox), if there is way for export using python instead, it is welcomed also.</p>
  
  <h3>update 01</h3>
  
  <p>Quite a few suggested using csv, it may not very possible in my case because there is a field containing free text that I cannot control what kind of character is entered in that field, making selection of separator difficult.</p>
  
  <h3>update 02</h3>
  
  <p>thank you for the suggestions, but I found that the R packages are fine only if the dataframe is relatively small and it is even slow for dataframe with all columns being character. Any suggestions?</p>