I'm currently running jupyter + R on my Mac but every time I try to load an Excel (XLS) file, things fail. After hours of troubleshooting, I think I've narrowed down the problem and solution.

Problem

If you're Mac looks like this, you might have a hard time installed XLConnect.

macOS-rjava

Here's what my error commonly looked like.
xlconnect-rjava-error

The key error messages were:

1: In install.packages("XLConnect") :
  installation of package ‘rJava’ had non-zero exit status
2: In install.packages("XLConnect") :
  installation of package ‘XLConnectJars’ had non-zero exit status
3: In install.packages("XLConnect") :
  installation of package ‘XLConnect’ had non-zero exit status

My Solution

I cannot promise you that this will work but it worked for me.

Step 0 - Install JDK using Homebrew

DO THIS FIRST!!!
Read this tutorial on how to install the Java Development Kit using Homebrew.

Step 1 - Double Check Your Work

Things are looking good if you see this while typing:

java -version

java-is-up-to-date

Then run this command.

sudo R CMD javareconf

Source

Step 2 - Start R

After you've installed the Java JDK, start R.

r

Step 3 - Install rJava Package

R uses CRAN as its package manager but we're going to install a specific version of rJava for macOS.

install.packages("https://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/rJava/rJava_0.9-9.tar.gz")

Things are looking good if you see this.
rjava-complete

Step 4 - Install XLConnect Package

XLConnect is the library required to start working with XLS files.

 install.packages('XLConnect', repos='https://cran.cnr.berkeley.edu/')

Things are looking good if you see this.
xlconnect-success

Done!

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