Excel file reading and writing in MATLAB - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Excel file reading and writing

📖 Scenario: You work in an office where you need to handle sales data stored in Excel files. You want to read this data into MATLAB, process it, and then save the results back to a new Excel file.

🎯 Goal: Learn how to read data from an Excel file, modify it, and write the updated data back to a new Excel file using MATLAB.

📋 What You'll Learn

Read data from an Excel file named sales_data.xlsx

Create a variable to hold the sheet name Sheet1

Calculate the total sales for each product

Write the updated data with total sales to a new Excel file named sales_summary.xlsx

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Handling sales or inventory data stored in Excel files is common in many businesses. Automating this with MATLAB saves time and reduces errors.

💼 Career

Data analysts, engineers, and scientists often need to import and export Excel data for reporting and analysis.

1

Read data from Excel file

Write a line of MATLAB code to read the data from the Excel file named sales_data.xlsx into a variable called data.

MATLAB

% Your code here

Need a hint?

Use the readtable function with the filename as a string.

2

Set sheet name variable

Create a variable called sheetName and set it to the string 'Sheet1'.

MATLAB

data = readtable('sales_data.xlsx');
% Your code here

Need a hint?

Assign the string 'Sheet1' to the variable sheetName.

3

Calculate total sales

Add a new column called TotalSales to the data table by multiplying the columns Quantity and Price.

MATLAB

data = readtable('sales_data.xlsx');
sheetName = 'Sheet1';
% Your code here

Need a hint?

Use element-wise multiplication .* to multiply Quantity and Price columns.

4

Write updated data to new Excel file

Write the data table to a new Excel file named sales_summary.xlsx using the sheet name stored in sheetName. Use the writetable function.

MATLAB

data = readtable('sales_data.xlsx');
sheetName = 'Sheet1';
data.TotalSales = data.Quantity .* data.Price;
% Your code here

Need a hint?

Use writetable with the filename, the table, and the sheet name as arguments.