Curious about the speed of readtable

Hi, I'm wondering why readtable takes so long to parse when you specify a worksheet and a range. Does anyone know?

I have a company spreadsheet that I'm trying to read into Matlab. The top of the worksheet has a load of rubbish and the actual table f interest starts on row 7. There are only 5000 odd rows, but it takes an age to read in, whereas I have another spreadsheet that only has a table and that reads in within a second or so despite being well over a million rows.

I guess I'm just curious as to why it takes so long and if there is a better method to be using.

Thanks

[Benjamin]

have you tried any other comparable functions like csvread or xlsread? it's hard to know what is slow about reading that file without an example (i.e. what does "a load of rubbish" mean exactly?)