The technique of using "xlsread"

Hi, I am extracting lots of data from 100 Excel sheets. They are financial statement table. For instance in sheet one, the "Total assets" is in row A10, but in second table, "Total assets" is in row 17. How can I use 'xlsread' function to extract data from the given name? Thank you!

[Leah]

Is "Total assets" always in column A? Was your example suppose to be: Sheet1 A10 and Sheet2 A17?

Answer 1

[Leah]

First you have to read in both numbers and txt

[num txt]=xlsread('Book2.xlsx','Sheet1')

then you can find the cell that contains Total assets

ismember(txt,'Total assets')

Without knowing exactly what else is in your sheet it's hard to give you much more. Hope it helps.

Answer 2

[Image Analyst]

Unless you use ActiveX programming, reading 100 Excel files will be horribly slow because it will involve launching Excel, reading the data, and shutting down Excel 100 times. Better to just open Excel once, reading the files, then shutting it down once. That will bring the time from very many minutes to probably less than one minute.

Answer 3

[Richard]

The following link may be useful:

<http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/22365-function-for-faster-data-transfer-matlab-%3C-%3E-excel>

It follows from image analysts' suggestion.