Difficulty importing dates using readtable

I'm trying to read some dates into matlab to do arithmetic with. The excel looks like this

right now, I'm trying

uRiDdD = readtable('filename.xls', 'datetime','%{d-MMM-y}D,%f%f%f');

but I get the following error:

Error using readtable (line 197)

Expected input to match one of these values:

'text', 'datetime', 'exceldatenum'

The input, '%{d-MMM-y}D,%f%f%f', did not match any of the valid values.

Answer 1

[dpb]

The file doesn't match the format string -- it has a numeric value followed by two dates and who knows what else afterwards and you told it there was one date followed by three floating point values. Clearly that won't work...should be no mystery there.

First, unless the file is huge, just let readtable operate on its own; you have unambiguous date formats, it should have no issues interpreting the input unless there are ambiguities elsewhere in the file.

[Jeremy Hughes]

Format also doesn't work with Spreadsheets, only text.