Re: Excel Data in Octave

[fork]

Timothy Field <timafield <at> gmail.com> writes:

>  I've tried csvread on excel sheets saved as Data.csv, but it never is able to
load the file. 

csvread won't work on proprietary Excel files (.xls etc), only on *plain text*.

You have to "save as" in Excel, then choose cvs format from the dialogue.  Excel
will then prompt you a bunch of misleading crap about formats and "do you really
want to do this..." and you navigate that.

http://excel.tips.net/T002483_Creating_a_CSV_File.html

You should then be able to open the csv in notepad++ or another text editor, and
see just a bunch of (human readable) "comma separated values" in each line. 
This is the file on which you would call dlmread() (see the help if necessary).

http://notepad-plus-plus.org/

It might take a little time to get used to working in plain text if you have
been trained in a M$ world, but it will pay you back a thousand fold.

If you have more questions about working with plain text data and Octave, feel
free to post them and I will try to help.

(Personally, I don't ever use the io or the java packages, nice as they are,
because I detest non-text file formats, unless they are in HDF or an SQL
database. Many would agree with me, and many would not.)