read_excel_columns(​filename,sheet,colu​mns,firstrow,lastro​w)

If you need to read one or mode columns of numeric data from a large Excel file, this will do it faster, and use less memory, than xlsread. Reads the same rows from all columns and returns an array. Non-numeric entries return NaNs. The columns need not be consecutive, and can be specified by letter code or number.