MATLAB: Use wildcards with excel

wildcards

Hi. I am trying to read the first column of a sheet that contains a list of filepaths and look inside the folders for *.xlsx and open them. Unfortunately I get an error message. Do you have an idea how to solve this? Thank you very much in advance.
[~, entry] = xlsread(workbookFile,sheetName);
    for i=1
        sourceDir = xlsread(entry{i,1}); %error message here
        sourceFiles = dir(fullfile(sourceDir, '*.xlsx'));
        data(:,1) = xlsread(sourceFiles, 1, [entry{i,3} ':' entry{i,3}]);
  ...
Alternative Code:
    data(:,1) = xlsread(dir(fullfile(entry{i,1}, '*.xlsx')), 1, [entry{i,3} ':' entry{i,3}]);
Error: File name must be a string
      data(:,1) = xlsread(dir(fullfile(entry(i,1), '*.xlsx')), 1, [entry{i,3} ':' entry{i,3}]);
Error: Error using dir. Function is not defined for 'cell' inputs.

Best Answer

xlsread() cannot read directories ir wildcards. You need to use dir() to find the contents of the folders and read the files one by one.
The output of dir() is a structure not a list of file names
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