How to fix excel file reading issue in MATLAB

I have a MATLAB script that takes a bunch of similarly formatted excel files and amalgamates the data in those files into one excel sheet.

ds = spreadsheetDatastore(pwd, 'Range', 'A2:CH3', 'ReadVariableNames', true)
ds.readall
T = ds.readall
writetable(T, 'UPDRS_master.xlsx')

It usually works fine but it seems that whenever a column starts with a number - and then a letter/string appears later on, it doesn't read that and a blank appears.

Does anyone know how to fix this?

[dpb]

Use detectimportoptions to create an import object and then use readtable with said object. You'll want to identify specifically by variable which is which -- the alternate routines set the data type based on the first data they find -- if it's numeric then the column is interpreted as numeric so if it really is mixed you'll need to define it as cellstr.