Importing from Excel dropping first column

Hi everyone,

I have some code that imports time series data from Excel into MATLAB on my Mac laptop using xlsread. When I send the code to my advisor and he runs it on his PC, he runs into significant problems because his MATLAB seems to skip the date column, so the first column of the imported document is the second column of the Excel file. It occurs to me that this must be a compatibility issue, but I cannot find a quick fix anywhere. Thoughts?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

[Image Analyst]

You forgot to attach the file. Change the numbers and text if you need to anonymize it, but it's the only way we can try it. Does he see all columns if he opens it in Excel rather than MATLAB? Is the data in a table format (columns of data with a row for column headers)? Can you use readtable() instead of xlsread()?

t = readtable(excelFullFileName);

[Tristan]

Sorry for forgetting to attach. I figured out the problem. I had to convert the Excel dates to numeric format. xlsread was not treating them as numeric, and hence skipping them. Thanks for your help!

[Image Analyst]

Ah, you were just doing

numbers = xlsread(filename);

I almost never do that. Usually I want the raw cell array like you get by doing

[numbers, strings, raw] = xlsread(filename);

The usual reason I do this is that the rows and columns for numbers and strings is out of sync. A certain row, column specified for numbers and strings does not refer to the same cell in Excel, whereas it does with raw. But in your situation, you could get the dates in the non-numeric format (whatever that is) by using the third return argument of xlsread() and shouldn't have to worry about converting format in Excel prior to importation.