Loading in Matlab an .xls file created in Stata

Question

I have the following problem:

1) consider a dataset in Stata whose variables are of type float, double, byte. Observations are all "numbers"

2) I want to save the dataset in .xls format; hence I type in Stata export excel using ".../A.xls"

3) When I open A.xls in Excel, the cells have format "General"

4) I want to load A.xls in Matlab but I get the error Unreadable Excel file: XLS File contains unicode text which is not yet supported

5) If, instead, before going to Matlab, I apply the format "Numbers" to the cells in Excel, A.xls can be easily loaded in Matlab.

Any suggestion on how going directly from Stata to Matlab in this particular case?

Answer 1

With Stata 14, you can save the file as xlsx instead of xls. In this case, the error message on OSX disappears. On Windows, xls seems to work fine as well.

Answer 2

is the problem you having just from xlsread? did you try readtable?