MatLab: Iterating dynamically through Cells with Excel COM Add-In - excel

Question

First of all thanks a lot, for very good answers that I have found here in other topics in the past.
Now to a new challenge:
I am currently working with the COM Add-In in Matlab, i.e. I am reading a Excel Workbook and extracting the Color Property:
excelapp = actxserver('Excel.Application'); %connect to excel
workbook = excelapp.Workbooks.Open('Solutions.xls');
worksheet = workbook.Sheets.Item(1);
ColorValue_Solutions=worksheet.Range('N2').Interior.Color;
Now, I want to do this for cells in the Range A1 up to J222, for which I would like to dynmaically loop through the Range property, letting the programm read each cell individually and then taking out the color proerty. For example:
Columns = {'A', 'B', 'C', 'D', 'E', 'F', 'G', 'H', 'I', 'J'};
for j = 1:length(Columns)
for i = 1:222
worksheet.(char( strcat('Range(''',Columns(j), num2str(i), ''')') )).Interior.Color
end
end
This, however, results in an error:
Undefined function or variable 'Range('A1')'.
I guess the problem is in the combination of interpreting a string with an included string, i.e. Range('A1').
Any help is much appreciated.

Answer 1

Some time ago I asked a similar question. Check it out, maybe you will find it helpful.
The following code should do what you want:
You can see how the Interior.Color property is extracted from every cell by first getting a Cell object, then accessing the Interior object of that Cell and finally getting the Color property of that Interior object. The Color property is a color integer defined by Microsoft (you can learn more here and here), I store that value in a matrix (M). In order to repeat this process through the specified range of cells, I use a nested loop, like you were doing already. Once the process is finished, I display the contents of M.
excelapp = actxserver('Excel.Application'); % Start Excel as ActiveX server.
workbook = excelapp.Workbooks.Open('Solutions.xls'); % Open Excel workbook.
worksheet = workbook.Sheets.Item(1); % Get the sheet object (sheet #1).
ncols = 10; % From column A to J.
nrows = 222; % From row 1 to 222.
M(nrows, ncols) = 0; % Preallocate matrix M.
for col = 1:ncols % Loop through every column.
for row = 1:nrows % Loop through every row.
cell = get(worksheet, 'Cells', row, col); % Get the cell object.
interior = cell.Interior; % Get the interior object.
colorint = get(interior, 'Color'); % Get the color integer property.
M(row, col) = colorint; % Store color integer in matrix M.
end
end
disp(M); % Display matrix M with the color integer information.
Remember to close the connection when you are finished. You can learn how to do it here and here.