[Help] writetable text alignment and saving pre 0

Hello Everyone,

I am incurring a little problem on execution of following code

filename='myExcelFile.xlsx';
myTable = cell2table(Dataset, 'VariableNames', header);
writetable(myTable, filename, 'WriteVariableNames', true);

By writing a table to excel, it removes pre 0. I mean it saves 0409 to 409. Is there any way to preserve initial zeros?

Second, can we sort the data in columns as well? For instance, it sorts Text data to flush left and numerical data to flush right. Can we initialize a directon for that?

Any help would be appreciated.

Thank you :-)

[Adam Danz]

Waqar Ali Memon's comment moved here from the answers section.

Thank you Guillaume and Adam Danz Is there anyway to accept both answers. Since, both are authentic and accurate. :-)

[Adam Danz]

@Waqar Ali Memon,

Sometimes there's a glitch in the system that allows for >1 answer to be accepted within a quick window of time but generally only 1 acceptance is allowed. That discussion is here:

https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/423844-is-it-possible-that-answers-can-be-accepted

Flip a coin or choose Guillaume's since he beat me by <1 minute ;)

[Waqar Ali Memon]

Yeahhh... Done for both answers :-)

Thank you :-) By the way Guillaume won the toss :-p

Answer 1

[Adam Danz]

"By writing a table to excel, it removes pre 0. I mean it saves 0409 to 409. Is there any way to preserve initial zeros?"

Numerically it makes no difference whether there are leading 0s or not. There are settings within Excel (see link) to allow for leading zeros. Alternatively you can convert the numers to strings and write them as strings ('0409', with quotes) but then you'll need to convert them back to numeric for the data to be useful so this would be a poor choice.

"can we sort the data in columns as well? For instance, it sorts Text data to flush left and numerical data to flush right. Can we initialize a directon for that?"

I believe you're asking about right/left justification (not sorting). Please correct me if I'm wrong. Again, that's a setting you can control from excel (see link).

If I'm understanding your questions correctly, none of these issues are controllable from Matlab. The 2 links I shared where among the first links provided by a quick google search.