How to control the significant digits in an xlswrite

Hello!

I got some very good answers to a previous post about Excel xlswrite and the MATLAB COM API, controlling the number of columns. That made the write come out not "squished", but now I've got a zillion decimal digits! (well, nine really, but only three are meaningful). Any suggestions on this?

This looks like a great utility, but I haven't figured out where it is documented.

Thanks again.

Doug

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

If you are not using xlswrite() in 'basic' mode then numeric values are written in binary so the number of decimals cannot be controlled by xlswrite(). The work-around is to adjust the number of decimal places before you call xlswrite().

Caution: the only three decimal digit fractions that can be exactly represented in binary are .0, .125, .25, .375, .5, .625, .75, .875 . You can use round(Value*1000)/1000 to approximate 3 decimal places, but the approximations will not be exact except for the 8 values I list.