MATLAB: How to make “xlswrite” “writetable” ACTUALLY work for output excel files

xlswrite

seems that people had the same issues in the past and there is no well-established solutions.
I have 2015a Matlab on a mac and got my excel from my university network (download and install). This is the case for most of students and faculty members. However, xlswrite says
"Warning: Could not start Excel server for export. XLSWRITE will attempt to write file in CSV format. > In xlswrite (line 174)"
writetable says: "Error using writetable (line 106) Could not start Excel server for export. Export to a text file instead."
I am very shocked about this, since these two commands are so essential. Please help.
Henry

Best Answer

The first thing you would have to do is convince Microsoft to compile Microsoft Office for Mac with some COM library for Unix / Linux, because it literally is not compiled to support the COM interface at present.
You would then need to get the various distributors of Unix and Linux to agree upon a compatible interface and implement it and test it and add it to the distributions.
The below item talks about some of the technical measures involved, from the perspective of a few years ago. They casually mention DCE as being needed to deal with multiple architectures. I had some experience with DCE in a past position; it is a pain in the posterier to get right. It also used to be quite expensive, but perhaps that has been overcome. Note in this regard that Microsoft's COM implementation cannot even talk between 32 bit and 64 bit processes and so is just not ready for the Linux world of different chips and different byte orders.
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa260790%28v=vs.60%29.aspx
With regards to the current situation on Linux, see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3063321/is-there-an-equivalent-to-com-on-nix-systems-if-not-what-was-the-nix-approa
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