xlwrite

Platform independent alternative for Matlab's xlswrite function

Problem

Matlab's build in xlswrite only writes to xls and xlsx files on a Windows platform that has Excel installed. This is because it is using COM-objects which are only supported on Windows.

Solution

xlwrite is a platform independent replacement for xlswrite. It uses a java library, Apache POI, that allows to generate xls(x) files on any platform, including Linux and OS X.

xlwrite uses the same syntax as xlswrite, making it easy to integrate and interchange in existing applications.

How To

Demo1

• Download or clone this repository: git clone https://github.com/adezegher/xlwrite.git
• Open Matlab and navigate to the path containing this repository.
• Run demo1 from the Matlab command line: demo1_xlwrite.m

General usage

For correct operation of xlwrite:

• Ensure you have Apache POI libraries extracted. Without the libraries xlwrite will not work!
• Ensure the Apache POI libraries are loaded before running xlwrite by adding following code before invoking xlwrite:

javaaddpath('poi_library/poi-3.8-20120326.jar');
javaaddpath('poi_library/poi-ooxml-3.8-20120326.jar');
javaaddpath('poi_library/poi-ooxml-schemas-3.8-20120326.jar');
javaaddpath('poi_library/xmlbeans-2.3.0.jar');
javaaddpath('poi_library/dom4j-1.6.1.jar');
javaaddpath('poi_library/stax-api-1.0.1.jar');

-- NOTE: Change the paths to match the location of the poi_library folder!

Supported Data Types

xlwrite supports following datatypes:

• string
• numerical
• logical/boolean The type of data is kept in Excel: for example boolean data in matlab will be saved as boolean in Excel.

xlwrite also supports a combination of above datatypes in a cell array like for example: xlsData = {1 true 'text' false; 10 -12.5 6 false};