Re: Excel Data in Octave

[Timothy Field]

On Thu, Apr 26, 2012 at 2:02 PM, forkandwait [via Octave] <[hidden email]> wrote:

Timothy Field <timafield <at> gmail.com> writes:

>  I've tried csvread on excel sheets saved as Data.csv, but it never is able to
load the file. 

csvread won't work on proprietary Excel files (.xls etc), only on *plain text*.

You have to "save as" in Excel, then choose cvs format from the dialogue.  Excel
will then prompt you a bunch of misleading crap about formats and "do you really
want to do this..." and you navigate that.

http://excel.tips.net/T002483_Creating_a_CSV_File.html

You should then be able to open the csv in notepad++ or another text editor, and
see just a bunch of (human readable) "comma separated values" in each line.
This is the file on which you would call dlmread() (see the help if necessary).

http://notepad-plus-plus.org/

It might take a little time to get used to working in plain text if you have
been trained in a M$ world, but it will pay you back a thousand fold.

If you have more questions about working with plain text data and Octave, feel
free to post them and I will try to help.

(Personally, I don't ever use the io or the java packages, nice as they are,
because I detest non-text file formats, unless they are in HDF or an SQL
database. Many would agree with me, and many would not.)

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NAML

Thank you, simple text format seems like a good option. Can you help me troubleshoot why I can't open my TestData file with dlmread('TestData.csv')?

I opened an excel spreadsheet, went to save as, named it TestData.csv and chose .csv as the format. No pop-up windows warned about excel functionality. I entered some plain data into two rows, and then saved before closing. I then opened the file 'TestData.csv' with text editor to make sure it was in a good format. I had 4 rows of two values each separated by a column. I called dlmread('TestData.csv') in octave (making sure I was in the '/Users/user/Desktop' path), but it gave me the error: dlmread: unable to open file `TestData.csv'.

Anything that I am forgetting? Please help

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