Using a Loop to read and store information?

I have data stored in 10 different excel documents. Each document has the same table-like format. My goal is to read the information I want to use from the excel data, load it into my script, and reorganize it into a new excel sheet. For this question, I want to know if there is a way that I can use a while or for loop to load my data, rather than type out load for each document.

Each excel document is titled in ascending order, such as 'a1', 'a2' ... 'a10'

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

http://matlab.wikia.com/wiki/FAQ#How_can_I_process_a_sequence_of_files.3F

Or potentially you could use a datastore()

[Gabriela Garcia]

This helped me to load the data, thank you!

But I was not clear that I wanted this data in a table or matrix format so that I might compare them. I am relatively new to Matlab, so I am not sure if I can use this function to also read each excel as a matrix within the loop?

[Walter Roberson]

https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/47434-natural-order-filename-sort

dinfo = dir('a*.xlsx');
filenames = {dinfo.name};
filenames = natsortfiles(filenames);
numfiles = length(filenames);
datacell = cell(numfiles,1);

for K = 1 : numfiles
    datacell{K} = readmatrix(filenames{K});
end

Now you can examine datacell{1}, datacell{2} and so on.

This code does not assume that the matrices are all the same size.

In the special case that they are all the same size, then

data = cat(3, datacell{:});

would create a 3D matrix where the third dimension corresponds to different files.