Is D a local disk or a remote network disk? This will go much faster if you save the files locally before trying to read them all.
fileDir = 'D:\excel_folder';
outfile = 'D:\MASTER.xls';
addpath(fileDir);
fileNames = dir(fileDir);
fileNames = {fileNames.name};
fileNames = fileNames(cellfun(...
@(f)~isempty(strfind(f,'.xls')),fileNames));
for f = 1:numel(fileNames),
fTable = readtable(fileNames{f});
writetable(fTable,outfile,'Sheet',filenames{f});
end
Each sheet of MASTER.xls should now have the same name as the file that contained the data.
Hope this helps.
