Compatibility Mac vs Windows

Hi there,

I realized that there is a compatibility issue with the xlsread function concerning the operating system, This compatibility issue creates reporducability problems when it comes to testing the code. More specifically:

[data, txt, raw] = xlsread(filename,sheet,xlRange);

When it comes to running this code on a Mac (R2018b), what I get is the full range data including the the first column which has to do with dates under the variable "data" , all the char values under the variable "txt" (at my example an 0x0 empty cell array) and a cell array again with all the data within the xlRange under the variable "raw", with the dates in their Excel-numeric version.

At this point let me specify the fact the first column of my data are dates with the format dd/mm/yyyy and the rest just numerical values no characters or names etc, etc..

When I import the above data (time series) in MATLAB i just have to run the :

dates = x2mdate(data(:,1));

function in order to get the correct numerical dates under the MATLAB framework, and everything just works fine especially when it comes to plotting the time series when I use the:

dates = datestr(dates);
t = datetime(dates);

functions .

Well, I grab this piece of code and throw it into a Windows installed MATLAB (R2018b). Things are a bit different, and annoying.... :

• data : contains only the columns 2:8 without the first column of dates compared to the data variable on a mac where I also get the first column with numeric dates under the Excel format.
• txt : is a full cell array with the first column containing the dates according to the Excel's sheet format as char
• raw : is a full cell array containing everything, however, the first column of dates are chars under the Excel's sheets format.

This means that I cannot reproduce the code in different operating systems. Can anyone please specify a solution or an explanation to this? Do I really have to insert if statements for the user to choose the operting system and follow the corresponding code to run the program? ....annoying.

Thank you all in advance.

[Rik]

Not really a solution to your problem, but you can use ispc isunix and ismac functions to determine the host OS. Note that the isunix function returns true for both Linux and Mac.

[Walter Roberson]

datetime() 'convertfrom', 'excel'

is better than x2mdate

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

Use readtable().

[iLikeMatlab]

This means that there is no solution (?) .

Anyway, yes, this works. Thank you Walter.

[Walter Roberson]

'readvariablenames', false

to prevent the first line being turned into variable names.