xls_open — Open an Excel file for reading
[fd,SST,Sheetnames,Sheetpos] = xls_open(file_path)
a character string: the path of the Excel file.
a number, the logical unit on the Excel stream.
A vector of all character strings which appear in the Excel sheets.
a vector of strings: the sheet names.
a vector of numbers: the position of the beginning of sheets in the Excel stream.
This function first analyzes the ole2 data structure associated with the
given file to extract the Excel stream which is included in. After
that the Excel stream is saved in the TMDIR directory
and opened. The fd logical unit points to this temporary
file. Then the first sheet in this stream is read to get the global information
like number of sheets, sheet names Sheetnames, sheet
adresses within the stream Sheetpos and the
SST which contains all the strings used in the following
sheets.
The fd and Sheetpos data have to be passed to
xls_read to read the data sheets.
The readxls function can be used to read all an Excel file in one function with a single function call.
Warning only BIFF8 Excel files (last Excel file version (2003)) are handled
//Decode ole file, extract and open Excel stream
[fd,SST,Sheetnames,Sheetpos] = xls_open('SCI/modules/spreadsheet/demos/xls/Test1.xls')
//Read first data sheet
[Value,TextInd] = xls_read(fd,Sheetpos(1))
//close the spreadsheet stream
mclose(fd)
This function is based on the Microsoft ole2 file documentation (http://chicago.sourceforge.net/devel/docs/ole/) and on Excel stream description from OpenOffice (http://sc.openoffice.org/spreadsheetfileformat.pdf).