Importing rows with empty cels from EXCEL

Dear all, I am trying to export rows with empty cells in several first elements. For instance a row in excel is [ _ _ 4 5 6]; first 2 cells being empty, Matlab reads this a=[4 5 6], it does not insert NaN's, and makes size 3, instead of 5. Is there a way to fix this?

Best regards, Can Sever University of Maryland

[Can Sever]

Since I have thousans of column with unbalanced data, this is a big problem for me. Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

[dpb]

With xlsread alone the only way is to specify the range and return the raw data cell array. There may be a way with the COM/DDE/ActiveX but that's more of an Excel question than Matlab as far as communication protocols/methods.

Example; made a one-row spreadsheet as you described--

>> [x,t,r]=xlsread('book1.xls','A1:E3')
x =
   1     2     3
t = 
   {}
r = 
  [NaN]    [NaN]    [  1]    [  2]    [  3]
  [NaN]    [NaN]    [NaN]    [NaN]    [NaN]
  [NaN]    [NaN]    [NaN]    [NaN]    [NaN]
>>