MATLAB: Doesn’t XLSWRITE export Greek symbols to Excel from MATLAB 7.9 (R2009b)

MATLAB

I would like to use XLSWRITE to send formatted strings to Excel, including Greek symbols, but they do not show up in Excel as formatted symbols.
For instance, the following code correctly produces symbols on a MATLAB figure:
x = -pi:.1:pi;
y = sin(x);
plot(x,y);
t=text(1,0,'\Delta Sin(\pi)');
However, the following code does not export to Excel with the same formatting:
xlswrite('test.xls',{'\Delta Sin(\pi)'});

Best Answer

This is not a limitation of the XLSWRITE function, but rather it is a shortcoming of Excel itself. The reason why these symbols appear correctly in MATLAB is due to the TeX interpreter that is used to display these text objects. If we alter the code such that the text is used without the TeX interpreter, we can see that the symbols are not displayed as desired:
By default, MATLAB uses the TeX interpreter to display text objects, and thus the symbols appear correctly. However, Excel does not have this same interpreter installed and activated by default, and so you do not see these formatted symbols in the spreadsheet.
x = -pi:.1:pi;
y = sin(x);
plot(x,y);
t=text(1,0,'\Delta Sin(\pi)','interpreter','none');
But if we now use the TeX interpreter, the symbols appear as desired:
set(t,'interpreter','tex');
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