MATLAB: Excel dates

importing excel data

I understand that matlab cannot read excel dates in the sense that it changes hh:mm into decimals. This being said, is there a way of importing the dates as a string so that they would remain the same as in excel? I've tried using importdata and xlsread but neither seem to be able to!
cheers

Best Answer

Use [Num,Txt,Raw]=xlsread() and then "Raw" will keep the "hh:mm" string format, then you can use datenum() to convert it.
If the format of the cells in Excel is "Time", it looks like the numerical value is imported using xlsread(). You can use datestr() to convert it back. For example:
>> [Num,Txt,Raw]=xlsread('test.xls')
Num =
0.4743
0.5160
0.5576
0.5576
Txt =
'Date' 'Time'
'12/31/1899' ''
'1/1/1900' ''
'1/2/1900' ''
'1/3/1900' ''
Raw =
'Date' 'Time'
'12/31/1899' [0.4743]
'1/1/1900' [0.5160]
'1/2/1900' [0.5576]
'1/3/1900' [0.5576]
>> datestr(Num,'HH:MM')
ans =
11:23
12:23
13:23
13:23