Using ActiveX to import data from Excel to MATLAB

I can find so many examples of going from MATLAB to excel but not the other way around. I don't want to use xlsread because it's super slow and I want to read from multiple sheets within a file and using xlsread for each sheet individually for each file (there are so many files) would take hours. I know how to do the following:

Excel = actxserver('Excel.Application');
set(Excel, 'Visible', 1);

Workbooks = Excel.Workbooks;
exlFile = Workbooks.Open(filename);

eSheets = exlFile.Sheets;
eSheet1 = eSheets.get('Item', sheetname);
eSheet1.Activate;

and then I try to get the range using:

colEnd = eSheet1.Range('A1').End('xlToRight').Column;
rowEnd = eSheet1.Range('A1').End('xlDown').Row;

and then taking the column numbers and converting to letters with numbers using char and dividing by 26. so my variable xlRange looks like 'A1:EO5000' for example because EO is the last column with data and 5000 is the last row with data but then it doesn't accept the following:

   Range = get(eSheet1,'Range',xlRange);
   out = Range.value;

and gives me Error: Object returned error code: 0x800A03EC which I looked up and it has to do with an improper range.

I know that cell EO5000 is empty because the later columns don't have as many rows as the first ones- but how can I go about reading all the data from the sheet without having problems with the range (and can I just avoid using the range? Is there a better way to do this?)

Answer 1

[Megna Hari]

JK I realized my mistake. I assigned xlRange = ['''A1:',char('A'-1+rem),char('A'-1+rem2),num2str(rowEnd),'''']; because I thought it needed quotes to work.

It doesn't like the quotes and accepts the range as xlRange = ['A1:',char('A'-1+rem),char('A'-1+rem2),num2str(rowEnd)];