writexl – Using write_xlsx in R

If you want to use the write_xlsx() function (from the writexl package), then you can simply make the row names into the first column of the data frame with the cbind() function:

mtcars1 <- cbind(" "=rownames(mtcars), mtcars)
writexl::write_xlsx(mtcars1, "mtcars1.xlsx")

I’ve used " "= so the header of column A will appear blank (it will be a space). It can be easily swapped to some other name (e.g., Model=) if desired.

If you have a list of data frames, this can be easily adapted to create a multiple sheet file:

mtcars2 <- list(Sheet1=mtcars[1:5, ], Sheet2=mtcars[6:10, ])
mtcars2_1 <- lapply(mtcars2, function(x) cbind(" "=rownames(x), x))
writexl::write_xlsx(mtcars2_1, "mtcars2.xlsx")