Use wildcards with excel

Hi. I am trying to read the first column of a sheet that contains a list of filepaths and look inside the folders for *.xlsx and open them. Unfortunately I get an error message. Do you have an idea how to solve this? Thank you very much in advance.

[~, entry] = xlsread(workbookFile,sheetName);

    for i=1
        sourceDir = xlsread(entry{i,1}); %error message here
        sourceFiles = dir(fullfile(sourceDir, '*.xlsx'));
        data(:,1) = xlsread(sourceFiles, 1, [entry{i,3} ':' entry{i,3}]);
  ...

Alternative Code:

    data(:,1) = xlsread(dir(fullfile(entry{i,1}, '*.xlsx')), 1, [entry{i,3} ':' entry{i,3}]);

Error: File name must be a string

      data(:,1) = xlsread(dir(fullfile(entry(i,1), '*.xlsx')), 1, [entry{i,3} ':' entry{i,3}]);

Error: Error using dir. Function is not defined for 'cell' inputs.

[Walter Roberson]

What does

class(entry{1,1})

show?

[GuidingDrifter]

it says 'char'

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

xlsread() cannot read directories ir wildcards. You need to use dir() to find the contents of the folders and read the files one by one.

The output of dir() is a structure not a list of file names