Adding a unit row to a table

Below is how I normall create my table in Excel:

TT = table(Year, Month, Day, Longitude, Latitude, Oxygen, Chlorophyll_A);
writetable(TT, 'test.xlsx');

The issue is that my community wants the units to appear in a separate row, so that the final Excel file will look like this:

Row #1: Year  Month  Day     Longitude        Latitude      Oxygen   Chlorophyll_A
Row #2: N/A    N/A   N/A  decimal_degrees decimal_degrees   umol/kg      ug/L
Row #3: 2005    3    12,        -120             25           206         3.7
...
and so on

My question is how do I modify my above program so that I could add an extra unit row (2nd Row in the Excel file) when using writetable?

Many thanks!

[Michael Soskind]

Hi Leon,

Looks like this question has been discussed previously, and although there is no solution with how to truly display the variables as another row, or next to the table header row, there is a way to set the property of the values within that row. That does not help you, but that is discussed here.

Best,

Michael

Answer 1

[Sindar]

% create example table
T = array2table(magic(3),"VariableNames",["a";"b";"c"]);
% define units
T.Properties.VariableUnits = ["m";"kg";"N"];
% print the variable names in the first row
writecell(T.Properties.VariableNames,'units_please.xlsx','Range',"A1")
% print the units in the second row
writecell(T.Properties.VariableUnits,'units_please.xlsx','Range',"A2")
% print the data starting in the third row
writetable(T,'units_please.xlsx',"Range","A3","WriteVariableNames",false)

[Sindar]

A limited function. You could try adding varargin and parsing the normal writetable arguments to figure out where to start the printing

function write_table_with_units(T,filename)
% print the variable names in the first row
writecell(T.Properties.VariableNames,filename,'Range',"A1")
% print the units in the second row
writecell(T.Properties.VariableUnits,filename,'Range',"A2")
% print the data starting in the third row
writetable(T,filename,"Range","A3","WriteVariableNames",false)
end

[Leon]

Awesome! Thank you so much.