How do you write to excel a cell array that contains both strings and numbers?

I have to write a relatively large cell array to excel. The text is primarily column headers but the data does have some text intertwined in it. Is there a simple way to do this?

I've done some digging but most everything I've found says use fprintf and specify when data is of a specific type. This data is too large to run something like that.

The text data is in specific columns, if there were a way to identify text data as strings and just tell MATLAB that all other fields are numeric, that's viable.

Answer 1

[Guillaume]

Just pass your cell array to xlswrite, nothing more complex.

%simple demo
c = {'abcd', 1234; 'foobar', -56}
xlswrite('test.xlsx', c);

I don't know where you've seen most everything that says use fprintf. You cannot write excel files with fprintf which is for writing text files. Excel files are binary (or in newer versions, a complex mess that you'd never write yourself as text).

[Avery Krovetz]

I'm running R2016b. that code generates the warning:

Could not start Excel server for export. XLSWRITE will attempt to write file in CSV format.

Then the error:

An error occurred on data export in CSV format.

Answer 2

[Fangjun Jiang]

As long as each cell is a single scalar or a single string, what is wrong with using xlswrite() directly?

TestData={'a',1;2,'b'};
xlswrite('ExcelFile',TestData);

[Jacinta Cleary]

I'm not sure if its a Mac thing (I think I saw that somewhere) but it doesn't seem like xlswrite can write text and data together. I've been trying to get this to work for a while. Does anyone have any updates?

Thanks!

[Bennett]

Can confirm in 2025 that this does not write any text to the resulting xls file. Hoping someone will see this comment as I am still dealing with this issue. Thanks!

[Fangjun Jiang]

It might be that iOS does not support xlswrite(). In 2025, you might want to check out these new functions writetable(), writematrix(), writecell().

Check the help document of xlswrite() in your MATLAB version to see what it recommends.

https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/xlswrite.html