Re: io-package, Octave 3.8

[Philip Nienhuis]

Please include the help-octaveML in your questions.

Other people with similar issues can benefit from the discussion as well.

Read on:
Joakim Woll wrote:
> Hi Philip,
>
> I recently installed Octave 3.8 to use it as a substitute to
> Matlab. Since my object is to evaluate numerical data gathered
> from excel documents I installed the io-package, which I seemed
> to manage, see attached file.
>
> But I can't use the function for reading numerical data from the
> excel spreadsheets (xlsread, etc.). Isn't the ii-package supporting
> Octave 3.8 yet?
>
> I'm running Octave 3.8 on a Macbook pro with OS X 10.9.1.

See here:
http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?41155

The actual issue is that building Octave with Java support still doesn't 
work on Mac OSX (Java is still required for .xls/.xlsx write support).
IIRC last summer or fall P. Dupuis managed to get an older Octave 
version on Mac OSX to work with Java (the OF Java package, so I think it 
should be possible to get Java support in the OSX binaries.
But I can imagine (don't know) that the Octave-on-Mac developers have 
other priorities at the moment.

W/o Java, you're stuck at reading only ("xlsread") .xlsx (Excel 2007 and 
up) (plus .ods and .gnumeric).
For .xls (Excel 97-2003) there's no other direct read option yet (other 
than convert to e.g., .csv).

Note that LibreOffice /OpenOffice.org on Mac OSX should be able to 
convert .xls to .xlsx.

BTW good to know (for me) that installing the io package works OK on Mac 
OSX.

Philip