Is it possible to decide which line is variable names in readtable?

I want to use readtable to read data from an excel file. As I understand, in readtable, the first line is automatically the variable names. However, in my excel file, not just the first line, but the starting 3 lines contain characters and I want to know whether it is possible to use readtable to have an output where the vaiable names are the words that appear in the 3rd (or any desired) line.

A part of the excel file looks like this:

and I want the output to be like this:

ML125    MLCorr    ML100    Ds
--------------------------------
32.2    32.2        48.44   15.2
...

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

Yes, you can do that. For example,

variable_row = 3;
datatable = readtable(filename, 'VariableNamesRange', variable_row);

In some cases you want to specify a location to read the data from. You can use 'Range' in some cases, but if you have complicated headers then it might be better to use the 'DataRange' option.

Note: 'VariableNamesRange' and 'DataRange' may be specific to spreadsheets; the option names might be different for text files.

[Saeid]

Thanks Walter. When I try this, and although the said rows have different names, the output ends up looking like:

Var1     Var2     Var3 

(or some strange number) and so on. I als tried setting 'VariableNamingRule' to 'preserve' but still turns out some strange variable name that is not what appears in the excel table

[Walter Roberson]

Can you attach a sample xlsx file for us to test with?

Answer 2

[Jeremy Hughes]

You can try:

readtable(filename,"NumHeaderLines",2)

or

opts = detectImportOptions(filename)

opts.VariableNamesRange = "A3"

T = readtable(filename,opts)