How to write a timetable to excel with rowtimes as dates without times?
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Take this simple example:
m = (1:3)';
dates = datetime(2025,m,15);
tt = timetable(dates,m);
writetimetable(tt,'tt.xlsx')
tt is a 3x1 timetable with dates but no times 00:00:
dates m
___________ _
15-Jan-2025 1
15-Feb-2025 2
15-Mar-2025 3
But the resulting excel sheet tt.xlsx includes the times 00:00:
dates m
1/15/25 00:00 1
2/15/25 00:00 2
3/15/25 00:00 3
How can I make writetimetable create an excel sheet with dates but no times 00:00?
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Accepted Answer
Star Strider
on 4 Jul 2025
That is likely a problem with Excel.
MATLAB writes the timetable correctly --
m = (1:3)';
dates = datetime(2025,m,15)
tt = timetable(dates,m);
writetimetable(tt,'tt.xlsx')
TT1 = readtimetable('tt.xlsx')
(I am using Ubuntu 24.04 so I do not have Excel or access to it.)
.
12 Comments
Star Strider
on 5 Jul 2025
Jeremy Hughes
on 11 Aug 2025
I'll confirm that the format that Excel is applying here is out of MATLAB's control. The PreserveFormat argument should work on a Mac, but has no effect on the date format, unfortunately.
More Answers (3)
Chuguang Pan
on 4 Jul 2025
Edited: Chuguang Pan
on 4 Jul 2025
You can use "InputFormat" option to specify the date format
m = (1:3).';
dates = datetime(2025,m,15,"InputFormat","dd-MM-yyyy");
tt = timetable(dates,m);
writetimetable(tt,'TT.xlsx');
readtimetable('TT.xlsx')
1 Comment
Dyuman Joshi
on 4 Jul 2025
Edited: Dyuman Joshi
on 4 Jul 2025
This does not work. The problem is with the excel that saves the data - Open the excel and you'd find the issue OP is facing.
Paul
on 5 Jul 2025
"If there was a way in Matlab to change the format in the first column in the excel file from "m/d/yy hh:mm" to "d-mmm-yyyy", my problem would be solved."
Seems like you might be able to define an empty .xlsx file that has the first column, starting from the second row, have the format you want. Call it empty.xlsx. Then when you want to write, copyfile empty.xlsx to the filename you want, and then use writetimetable with PreserveFormat and UseExcel both set to true. I didn't test this approach.
3 Comments
Paul
on 6 Jul 2025
Interesting. Works for me. Windows 11. Matlab 2024a.
>> copyfile empty.xlsx tt.xlsx
>> m = (1:3)';
>> dates = datetime(2025,m,15);
>> tt = timetable(dates,m);
>> writetimetable(tt,'tt.xlsx','PreserveFormat',true,'UseExcel',true);

Walter Roberson
on 7 Jul 2025
For MacOS and Linux, it is not possible to PreserveFormat .
About the best you can do on MacOS is to convert the timetable to a table, set the Format property of the appropriate column of the table to something like 'dd-MMM-uuuu', then set the appropriate column to be string() of the appropriate column. This will convert the column to the text in dd-MMM-uuuu format.
Unfortunately it is likely that Excel will then interpret the column as text rater than as datetime format.
3 Comments
Paul
on 25 Aug 2025
According to @Jeremy Hughes in this comment, PreserveFormat should work on Mac, but perhaps with no capability to format dates.
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