filename = 'S5_origin.xlsx';
In R2015a, you can try using readtable to generate a table. Note the resulting table has 215 rows, since the first row of the file was interpreted as the variable name.
T = readtable(filename)
I'm not sure what readtable options were available in R2015a to try to change how the file was interpreted, so if readtable doesn't work or the result is not to your liking, you can use xlsread to generate a cell array of char vectors:
[~,~,c] = xlsread(filename) % c is a cell array of char vectors (216x1)
I don't think you really want a 216x1 char matrix.
