Reading an Excel table with both numbers and text

I read an Excel table using the readtable function. I wanted to refer to specific values, whether text or numbers, but when I try to extract a specific value such as the value in column 4 and row 3 the output is not simply that string/number but also the heading. To solve this problem, I first used the table2array function but that lead to an error because the table has both text and numbers. An alternative is to read the table using the readmatrix function but the text is not readable in that case. Can anyone explain how the Excel table can be read as a matrix with both text and numbers so when you refer to the value in say column 4 and row 3 that returns only that value, not also the heading?

Answer 1

[Adam Danz]

Use readtable which will read the data in as a table which is 2 dimentional but not a matrix. If you haven't used tables, you may want to review table indexing. This is usually better than using a cell array. Matrices are not an option if you want to store numeric and non-numeric data within the same variable.