MATLAB: Importdata function yields empty data structure

Question

Hello,

I have been importing .xls and .xlsx data into matlab with calls similar to the following:

rawdata = importdata('/Users/username/Desktop/fromfile.xlsx');

it has worked in the past, but now MATLAB creates empty data structures.

i can open the .xlsx file in openoffice to see that the file is not empty, as well as in SPSS from which it was originally saved from a .sav to .xlsx.

any ideas as to why this function does not retrieve my data?

Thanks in advance for all your help.

Answer 1

Try

    file_spec = '/Users/username/Desktop/fromfile.xlsx';
    exist( file_spec, 'file' ) 
    [ num, txt, raw ] = xlsread( file_spec );