Any good ways to read data from messy Excel files?

Hi, I have some data in Excel files. They include variable names and variable contents (usually a column or a row) and some are two-dimension tables. They are spread in many sheets and files and not often in the same location of different sheets. So the usual xlsread, which is location-specific, does not help much. Is there a good way of reading them from Excel sheets? I know if they had been in text files, we can do low-level file I/O. However, if I export my data into text file, it will be even more messier... So I need some low-level import from Excel directly...

[dpb]

There's always the third optional return from xlsread that is the raw data as all textual information you can then parse to locate what's of interest...

[per isakson]

Besides "the third optional return from xlsread" another alternative is:

• Read Spreadsheet Data Using Excel as Automation Server