write vectors in cell array to excel

Hi all,

I'm wondering if there is any easy way to write vectors stored in a cell array (Data = cell(50,2)) to excel. At the moment I'm using a for loop but it seems quite messy. Preferably I would store them in pairs:

Column A = Data{1,1}
Column B = Data{1,2}
Column C = Data{2,1}
Column D = Data{2,2}
etc

Best,

Rick

[Stephen23]

@Rick Verberne: do all of the vectors have exactly the same size?

[dpb]

If the cell array is as appears of one element per cell, then xlswrite will do it transparently.

If the data are all numeric and the same size as Stephen is preparing to say ( :) ) you can convert the cell to an array and xlswrite will handle that, too.

If the cells aren't regular, there's more work to do and it then depends on that structure as to how but given your output format it doesn't appear to be the issue.

[Rick Verberne]

Thank you both for the comments.

No the vectors are not. The two in each row are, but every next row is half the size. The 50 rows represent the same single dataset, but with different bin sizes. In the end I do a curve fitting on these sets and bit more, to find the ratio between peaks in the dataset

Answer 1

[OCDER]

Is this what you're trying to do?

%Making a sample cell array with variable-length vectors
Data = cell(50, 2);
for j = 1:50
    L = randi(10);
    Data(j, :) = {rand(1, L) rand(1, L)};
end

%Saving to excel format
MaxLen = max(cellfun('length', Data(:, 1)));
AllData = cell(MaxLen, numel(Data));
for j = 1:size(Data, 1)
    L = numel(Data{j, 1});
    AllData(1:L, 2*j-1) = num2cell(Data{j, 1});
    AllData(1:L, 2*j) = num2cell(Data{j, 2});
end
xlswrite('test.xlsx', AllData)

[Rick Verberne]

Great that works. Thank you very much!

Answer 2

[dpb]

Frankly, the easiest way would be to start with a normal array of nan(50,MaxRowLength) and then fill each row with the results and just write the full array.

NaN will be automagically ignored by plot and friends and you can essentially forget about having to dereference the cell arrays.

Otherwise, just loop over rows and write each with a call to xlswrite at the next row. This will be slow as xlswrite has a lot of overhead baggage; there's a FEX submittal that will allow multiple writes without opening/closing the workbook every time like does xlswrite.

ADDENDUM

I guess the alternative would be to "regularlize" the cell array with empty cells to the max size; then with each cell being a single value xlswrite should work directly as well.

[Rick Verberne]

Thank you, for now I'll stick to the loop as in the above answer. But I'll definitely give this a go. Especially since the speed of the process will get important near the end of the project.