Read and show multiline XLS in App Designer

I tried to find a solution to this, but failed. The situation is simple: I have an excel file with a lots of data, and I have an App Designer table, where I want to show them.

The problem is, that inside some cells there are very short or very long strings and designing a table with a huge cell is just looks ugly when there is only one or two words inside. Two idea came to my mind:

1) Word wrap - As I can found, App Designer's table is unable to wrap long texts into a new line automatically.

2) Put newline inside the XLS cells - This idea whould be also good, but it seems to me that App Designer's table is omitting any whitespace character.

I think I read the excel properly, since if I do

myXLSinput = readtable(myXLSlocation)
disp(myXLSinput)

inside the command window the "new line/carriage return" arrow appears where my new line is. I try to put it inside the table like this:

app.UITable.Data{rowIndex,colIndex} = myXLSinput{rowIndex,colIndex};

My data appears but everything inside the cell in is one line, where inside the XLS is in multiple lines.

Do you have any idea how can I complete this simple task?

Answer 1

[Rahul]

Hi @Peter Noszky,

I understand that there is no direct workaround for the issue mentioned which involves multiple lines to be displayed while displaying the 'uitable' in MATLAB App Designer.

A possible workaround in this situation would be to:

• Adjust the 'ColumnEditable' property of the 'uitable' to be true.
• Adjust the 'ColumnWidth' property of the 'uitable' to 'fit'.
• Wrap the data within each cell of the 'uitable' using 'textwrap' function.

Here is an example:

function ButtonPushed(app, event)
    app.UITable.ColumnEditable = true; 
    app.UITable.ColumnWidth = {'fit'}; 

    data = readtable('Book1.xls');

    
    % Convert the table to a cell array
    dataCell = table2cell(data);

    for i = 1:size(dataCell, 1)
        for j = 1:size(dataCell, 2)
            if ischar(dataCell{i, j}) % Check if the content is a string
                wrappedText = textwrap({dataCell{i, j}}, 50);
                dataCell{i, j} = strjoin(wrappedText, '\n'); % Join lines with newline character
            end
        end
    end
    
    % Set the UITable Data property to the cell array
    app.UITable.Data = dataCell;
    
    % Optionally, set the column names of the UITable
    app.UITable.ColumnName = data.Properties.VariableNames;

end

This would provide a scrollbar within the 'uitable' which can be used to read all the text content in a particular row horizontally as well as a scrollbar to go through different rows vertically.

NOTE: The attached 'table_app.mlapp' can be referred.

The following MathWorks documentations can be referred to know more:

'uitable.ColumnWidth': https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/uitable.html#namevaluepairarguments

'textwrap': https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/textwrap.html

Hope this helps. Thanks.