I was heading down the road @Voss took when got interrupted and when came back saw his response already posted..so, let's continue down that path
load test5
C = cellfun(@class,A,'UniformOutput',false);
[uC,~,idx] = unique(C);
unique(A(idx == 1)) % what's the content of the nonnumeric cells?
That's peculiar, indeed--the char() cells contain a numeric character that surely could have been converted -- this raises the question that one needs to see the original file in order to diagnose why the column was not all converted as numeric.
Another case where may need to do more diagnostics on the file and use the import options object to ensure that columns that are intended to be numeric are read in as numeric by setting the Vartypes field array before importing. Or, find out what is causing the input file to be created such that the values are being mistaken as char() and fix the process that creates the input file from the start.
