MATLAB: Xlsread returning empty only sometimes

excelimporting excel dataxlsread

I am having trouble with xlsread actually returning values. This code is in a for loop with i as the iterating variable.
sheet = strcat(num2str(i), ' in');
file = 'data.xlsx';
times_data = xlsread(file,sheet,'A3:A402');
Data1 = xlsread(file,sheet,'B3:B402');
Data2 = xlsread(file,sheet,'F3:F402');
Data3 = xlsread(file,sheet,'J3:J402');
Data4 = xlsread(file,sheet,'N3:N402');
Data5 = xlsread(file,sheet,'R3:R402');
In the code above only Data5 has anything stored in it. In the "Workspace" tab everything else is show as empty( with a [] symbol). Does anyone know why this may be and a way to fix it?

Best Answer

Any chance you can attach one of your spreadsheets? Much easier to debug that way.
Without seeing that, I'd have two guesses:
  1. Data1-4 and times_data are empty because there is no data in the specified range
  2. The data entered in those ranges is not numeric. In this case, you want to use the [num,txt,raw] = xlsread(___) syntax. You can read more in the xlsread documentation page.
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