strings and numbers from excel

Hi, I need to read table from excel. This table are filled with numers and strings and some cells are empty. Is there easy way to read such table in one matrix? Because now matlab just creates to matrices: one with strings and another with numbers and NaN's where strings used to be.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

[Fangjun Jiang]

Use the third returning argument of xlsread()

[NUMERIC,TXT,RAW]=XLSREAD(FILE)

I always prefer this way because then I can process the RAW information as I need. Some helpful functions are, isnan(), isnumeric()

Answer 2

[the cyclist]

I have used the following entry from the File Exchange with success:

http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/10946-readtext