Viktoria - you can use xlsread to read the data from the file, either dividing it up into numeric and text data, or all data into one cell array. Since you have a header column, the latter might be the way to go
[~,~,rawData] = xlsread('myFile.xls);
In your example, rawData should be a 5x3 cell array.
Now, use find to determine where in the first column of rawData is there a match to the name. If there is a match, find will return an index of the row in which that name is found. If there is no match, then an empty matrix is returned
name = 'Eric';
% look at all row elements in the first column returning
% the first match only
idx = find(strcmp(rawData(:,1),name),1);
if ~isempty(idx)
total = sum(cell2mat(rawData(idx,2:end)));
else
total = 0;
end
In the above, if our index is not empty, then we grab all elements in the row idx from the second column onwards (using rawData(idx,2:end)). This returns a cell array so we need to convert it to a matrix which we do with cell2mat. Then we can easily sum the elements giving us our total.
Note that if you wish to use a function, your signature should be something like
function [total] = CalculateTotal (name)
Rather than opening the Excel file each time you call this function, you may just want to pass the rawData as an input
function [total] = CalculateTotal (rawData,name)
Try the above and see what happens!
