I checked the .xls file and I checked the .txt file, and I do not see anything obvious wrong. All of the numeric values are there.
None of the header information is written out, but when you use xlsread() the first output only reflects the numeric content so it would not be expected that the headers would be written out. If you want to write out the headers as well, you should be using the three-output version of xlsread() and writing out the third of them:
[num, txt, raw] = xlsread('armstrong-2002-v1_database.xls');
And then you have to write out raw
A difficulty with writing out raw is that dlmwrite() only handles pure numeric values. You need to do some transformations on it and write it out as text:
B = raw;
B(cellfun(@isnan,B)) = {'-'}; %do not make it blank or empty or you will have trouble reading the file back in
idx = cellfun(@(C) ~isempty(C) && isnumeric(C(1)), B);
B(idx) = cellfun(@(V) sprintf('%g',V), B(idx), 'Uniform', 0);
%notice we have not transposed yet
fid = fopen('myFile.txt', 'wt');
%here's a trick: when you fprintf, it takes values down columns instead of across
%across rows. Normally you deal with that by transposing your data before sending it
%to fprintf. But we already have it in transposed form, so we can send it directly.
fmt = [repmat('%s ', 1, size(B,1)-1), '%s\n'];
fprintf(fid, B{:});
fclose(fid);
