Load ascii file

[Albatross]

Hi,
I would like to load an ascii data file (created from a spreadsheet) in octave
but I've some problems.
The file starts in this way:

# name: data
# type: matrix
# rows: 720
# columns: 22
 0.000 5.431 2.949 2.911 4.731 50.133  9.498 -0.442 -0.368  -0.239 .....

every line has 22 elements. I'm sure about this since I've used awk to check.
and there are 720 data lines, but when I use "load -ascii filename" I get the
error:

error: load: failed to load matrix constant
error: load: reading file prova4.prn
error: evaluating index expression near line 1, column 1

What's wrong?

Many thanks for any suggestion or help.