I stumbled on this question when someone sent me (yet another) Excel file to analyze. This one isn’t even that big but for whatever reason I was running into a similar error:
java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: GC overhead limit exceeded
Based on comment by @DirkEddelbuettel in a previous answer I installed the openxlsx package (http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/openxlsx/). and then ran:
library("openxlsx")
mydf <- read.xlsx("BigExcelFile.xlsx", sheet = 1, startRow = 2, colNames = TRUE)
It was just what I was looking for. Easy to use and wicked fast. It’s my new BFF. Thanks for the tip @DirkEddelbuettel!