Exporting strings to Excel using writetable

Walter's last comment about ActiveX is on the right track. With both xlswrite and writetable, if Excel is available, MATLAB will launch it and communicate to the running Excel process to write the data. On Mac (or if you don't have Excel) writetable uses a different method to write the excel file.

In the Excel application, writing text into a cell does some things in the background. If you type "9" in a cell, Excel turns that into a number. If you write a date that Excel recognizes, it will format that cell as a date. The same thing is happening when writetable is using Excel. This occurs in the Excel process, so there's nothing MATLAB can do about it. =/

When not using Excel, there's no opportunity for the type to change, so you get the exact thing from the table.

Does the same thing happen with string?

myString = ["'Abcd";"'493E07";"'Sep7"];
myTable = table(myString);
writetable(myTable,'myTable.xls')

@Jeremy Hughes,

I'm afraid that the present issue is a bug in matlab, not a problem with excel. Consider the following codes

• using direct actxserver

excel = actxserver('Excel.Application');  %start excel
wb = excel.Workbooks.Add
wb.Worksheets.Item(1).Range('A1').Value = '''aaa';
wb.SaveAs(fullfile(pwd, 'xlactx.xls'))
excel.Quit

• using vbscript (invoked outside matlab via cscript)

Set excel = CreateObject("Excel.Application")
Set wb = excel.Workbooks.Add
wb.Worksheets(1).Range("A1").Value = "'aaa"
wb.SaveAs("C:\users\guillaume\Documents\MATLAB\answers\xlvbs.xls")
excel.Quit

• using writetable

t = table({'''aaa'});
writetable(t, 'xltable.xlsx', 'WriteVariableNames', false)

The last one results in the doubling of the ' in the excel file. The first two don't.

Unfortunately, because the actual workbook handling code is a built-in class of matlab, it's not possible for us to know what is going wrong.