From Idea to CRAN: My Journey Building the `splitr` R Package

If you've ever thought, "I wish R could do X automatically," I have a story for you. Recently, I embarked on a journey to create my first R package — and let me tell you, it was one of the most fun and educational experiences in my coding career. The goal? Build splitr , a package that splits an Excel sheet into multiple sheets effi ciently, using data.table for speed and openxlsx for Excel magic. Step 1: The Idea and the Blueprint It all started with a common pain point: dealing with massive Excel files. Manually splitting data into chunks for reporting or analysis was tedious. I sketched out the plan: Read a source Excel sheet Split rows into n chunks Write each chunk into a separate sheet in a single workbook Apply styles and optionally save to disk Simple, right? But turning that plan into a robust, reusable R function is where the fun begins. 🛠 Step 2: Structuring the Package Using RStudio , I created a new package project called splitr . The structure looked like this: splitr/ ├─