MATLAB: Find a value in excel file

argumentexcelMATLAB

Hi everybody! Hope that somebody can help me, I'm relative new to matlab and are wondering if I have an excel file with a table containing both names an numbers, and I want to use a number related to one of the names in a function when the name is an input argument, am I supposed to use a loop or what?
EX:
Name  Bought  Sold
Eric  2  13
Linda  7  4
Jasmine  3  8
Fredrik  10  9
I want to have the name as an argument ex:
Function CalculateTotal (name)
The function should then "find" the right name and use the values related to that person so that for exampel;
CalculateTotal (Eric)
Should be 2+13=15
Any one who can help me?

Best Answer

Viktoria - you can use xlsread to read the data from the file, either dividing it up into numeric and text data, or all data into one cell array. Since you have a header column, the latter might be the way to go
 [~,~,rawData] = xlsread('myFile.xls);
In your example, rawData should be a 5x3 cell array.
Now, use find to determine where in the first column of rawData is there a match to the name. If there is a match, find will return an index of the row in which that name is found. If there is no match, then an empty matrix is returned
 name = 'Eric';
 % look at all row elements in the first column returning
 % the first match only
 idx = find(strcmp(rawData(:,1),name),1);
 if ~isempty(idx)
    total = sum(cell2mat(rawData(idx,2:end)));
 else
    total = 0;
 end
In the above, if our index is not empty, then we grab all elements in the row idx from the second column onwards (using rawData(idx,2:end)). This returns a cell array so we need to convert it to a matrix which we do with cell2mat. Then we can easily sum the elements giving us our total.
Note that if you wish to use a function, your signature should be something like
 function [total] = CalculateTotal (name)
Rather than opening the Excel file each time you call this function, you may just want to pass the rawData as an input
 function [total] = CalculateTotal (rawData,name)
Try the above and see what happens!
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