How to find strings in an excel file?

I want to find all colons in an excel file

colons = findstr(char, ':');

colons shows up empty. why is that?

[Yao Li]

Have you loaded the data from Excel file to matlab?

Answer 1

[Diana]

Thanks for your reply

Yes, I did.

I also tried

colons = findstr(string, ':');

Any idea of what could be wrong?

[Yao Li]

try

   find(strcmp(':',string ))

The string here should be a cell matrix loaded from the Excel file. This function returns the location of the colons.

[Diana]

I had to change to

find(strcmp(':',char)) so it would work

But it is still returning empty

[Yao Li]

sorry, I think it is not good to use string as the name of the variable.

find(strcmp(':',text_load_from_Excel ))

text_load_from_Excel is a cell type variable loaded from the Excel file

[Diana]

No worries. Can you explain to me what a cell type variable is?