Applying a border to Excel cells when using COM

I am writing simulation results from Matlab to Excel. In order to make it easier to read I apply some formating to the output. It works fine to change font size, font color, number format etc but applying a border around a selected number of cells doesn't work.

Example:

% -- Create excel sheet --
AppObj = actxserver('Excel.Application');
AppObj.Visible = true;
WkbkObj = AppObj.Workbooks;
DataWkbkObj = WkbkObj.Add;
DataWkbkObj.Sheets.Add().Name = 'Test';
DataSheetObj = DataWkbkObj.Sheets.Item('Test');
% -- Write some data --
DataSheetObj.Range('B2').Value = 43;
DataSheetObj.Range('B3').Value = 5;
DataSheetObj.Range('B4').Value = 7;

% -- Apply blue color --
DataSheetObj.Range('B2:B4').Font.Color = -4165632;

% -- Change number format --
DataSheetObj.Range('B2:B4').NumberFormat = '0,00';

% -- Apply a line on the left side --
DataSheetObj.Range('B2:B4').Borders('xlEdgeLeft').LineStyle = 'xlContinuous';
DataSheetObj.Range('B2:B4').Borders('xlEdgeLeft').Weight    = 'xlMedium';

The last two lines doesn't work. The problem is the 'xlEdgeLeft' part. I have tried to analyze the object and use constant values without result. Any ideas?

Answer 1

[Abhinav Gurram]

To apply specific borders to a range of cells in Excel, you would be required to use the 'Borders.Item' property that returns a Border object, as listed in the MSDN reference here: Borders.Item Property.

In order to set the border style for the range of cells in your example program, you can modify the last two statements as:

DataSheetObj.Range('B2:B4').Borders.Item('xlEdgeLeft').LineStyle = 1;
DataSheetObj.Range('B2:B4').Borders.Item('xlEdgeLeft').Weight = -4138;

Hope this helps!

[Steven]

This does not work on R2019a. I get this error:

Expected one output from a curly brace or dot indexing expression, but there were 5 results.

[Jared]

I know this is eight (8) years late, but this will be edify anyone else having this problem with all of the Excel Object library functionality not being available to MATLAB through the COM (component object model) operator (via actxserver).

Most of these types of inputs must be referred to by their Excel enumeration constant when operating from MATLAB through the COM operator.

This link has an exhaustive list of these constants: http://www.smarterdatacollection.com/Blog/?p=374

This is Microsofts list of these constants (but it isn't as exhaustive as the one above): https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/vba/api/excel.constants

So replace 'xlEdgeLeft' with numeral 7.

DataSheetObj.Range('B2:B4').Borders.Item(7).LineStyle = 1;

DataSheetObj.Range('B2:B4').Borders.Item(7).Weight = -4138;