How to reduce the time of reading an excel spreadsheet

I am trying to read an excel spreadsheet which has about 25 tabs. Each tab has string and numeric data. Ideally, data in each tab is stored in a separate matrix. I only need data from columns A:H of each tab and for unknown number of rows. If I do the following:

    [~, tabs, ~] = xlsfinfo([handles.pathname, Filename]);
    ntabs = length(tabs);
  for i = 4:ntabs
     Name = tabs{i};
     tic
     [~,~,raw] = xlsread([handles.pathname , Filename, Name];
     toc
     NF(i-3).Name = Name;
     NF(i-3).Data = raw(7:end, 1:8);
  end

each iteration (between tic toc) takes about 4.5 secs for each tab. A total of 25 tabs take 112sec

after changing the line

[~,~,raw] = xlsread([handles.pathname , Filename, Name];

to

[~,~,raw] = xlsread([handles.pathname , Filename, Name, 'A:H');

each iteration take now 6.4 secs. increasing the total time to 160 secs.

Any help on reducing the time taken for each iteration, is greatly appreciated. Thanks a lot in advance!