How do I read text paragraphs from Excel files?

I normally read text strings from Excel files by first converting the file into a CSV or TXT, and then use fopen, textscan, and fclose.

However, now I have a bunch of Excel files whose cells could contain delimiters such as commas or Tabs, making it really hard to first convert the file to CSV, or TXT and use "textscan" to read them.

Any ideas I can directly read strings from Excel cells. When I say strings, I mean paragraphs.

[dpb]

Doesn't

[~,txt]=xlsread(yourxlsfile);

return all text?

[Leon]

Yes, it does. Thank you very much.