Try something like this:
cellReference = sprintf('A%d:C%d', rowA, rowC); % Create cell reference
[numbers, strings, raw] = xlsread(filename, sheetname, cellReference);
where rowA and rowC are numerical variables saying what rows you want to read in.
Basically you can use sprintf() to build up any cell reference in the standard "A1:B2" style, then pass that in to xlsread().
