importdata function yields empty data structure

Hello,

I have been importing .xls and .xlsx data into matlab with calls similar to the following:

rawdata = importdata('/Users/username/Desktop/fromfile.xlsx');

it has worked in the past, but now MATLAB creates empty data structures.

i can open the .xlsx file in openoffice to see that the file is not empty, as well as in SPSS from which it was originally saved from a .sav to .xlsx.

any ideas as to why this function does not retrieve my data?

Thanks in advance for all your help.

[Walter Roberson]

Does the file have text in the each row? .xlsx and .xls files are read by calling xlsread() , and

The array does not contain any information from header lines, or from outer rows or columns that contain nonnumeric data. xlsread converts text in inner rows and columns to NaN.

Answer 1

[per isakson]

Try

    file_spec = '/Users/username/Desktop/fromfile.xlsx';
    exist( file_spec, 'file' ) 
    [ num, txt, raw ] = xlsread( file_spec );