can xlsread read everything as strings ? if not, are there any other options ?

it seems xlsread will distinguish between numbers and strings, thus unable to read EVERYTHING as strings. am i correct? If so, i can only think of using actxserver and reading the content cell-by-cell. However, it requires that the cell displays the full content, that is, it cannot display something like '#####' which is what you'll see in excel if the number is too long. is there any easier option ? thanks so much

[Guillaume]

Your premise is wrong. What is displayed in the cell by excel in no way prevents you from reading the full content of the cell. The two are completely independent.

What is displayed is the Text property of the Range object, the value of the cell is the value property of the Range object.

Answer 1

[Hikaru]

Have you tried using the command:

[~,~,RAW]=xlsread('filename')

The variable raw will contain everything, if I'm not mistaken.

[Elina]

thanks. sorry, it is not EVERYTHING as STRINGS: Still NUMBERS saved as NUMBERS and STRINGS saved as STRINGS. e.g. suppose an excel cell reads as a number 999,999 if i use xlsread, it will be saved as a number 999999 in a matlab cell. However, what i want in the cell is '999,999' which is a string in the cell.

[John]

I'm having the same problem. I have a string "2E10" which is being read in as 2.00E10.

Answer 2

[Guillaume]

Note that it is excel returning numbers as numbers and text as text (xlsread uses actxserver behind the scene), so if you want numbers as strings, you'll have to do the conversion yourself:

[~, ~, raw] = xlsread('somefile');
for idx = 1:numel(raw)
   if isnumeric(raw{idx})
      raw{idx} = num2str(raw{idx});
   end
end