Getting ready

First, make sure that your Leiningen project.clj file contains the right dependencies:

(defproject getting-data "0.1.0-SNAPSHOT"
  :dependencies [[org.clojure/clojure "1.6.0"]
                 [incanter "1.5.5"]"]])

Also, make sure that you've loaded those packages into the REPL or script:

(use 'incanter.core
     'incanter.excel)

Find the Excel spreadsheet you want to work on. The file name of my spreadsheet is data/small-sample-header.xls, as shown in the following screenshot. You can download this from http://www.ericrochester.com/clj-data-analysis/data/small-sample-header.xls.

How to do it…

Now, all you need to do is call incanter.excel/read-xls:

user=> (read-xls "data/small-sample-header.xls")

| given-name | surname |    relation |
|------------+---------+-------------|
|      Gomez |  Addams |      father |
|   Morticia |  Addams |      mother |
|    Pugsley |  Addams |     brother |

How it works…

This can read standard Excel files (.xls) and the XML-based file format introduced in Excel 2003 (.xlsx).