readtable and table2array

Hi I have a large data set (hourly electricity load data for 1 year, so 8760 observations). This is an excel file, so I used the readtable function to get the data. Everything works fine so far. Next, I wanted to convert the table to an array using table2array. It works fine, except that all the header names are gone. Why is this happening?

Here's my code:

inPutsT = readtable(inFile,'Sheet','load','Range','A1:D8785','ReadVariableNames',true);
inPutsA = table2array(inPutsT);

Is there a way to do this and keep the headers? Thanks

[David Fletcher]

Matrices don't have labelled columns, but you can extract the column names from the table properties and store them in a separate cell array

[Chet Sharma]

Thanks David - thanks for explaining. I ended up doing what you suggested.

Answer 1

[Peter Perkins]

Depending on what you are doing after you read in the spreadsheet, you may not need to convert to one numeric array. You might, but you can do a lot with the data in a table, and as you have discovered, tables have variable names and double matrices do not.