title: Importing Excel worksheet into Matlab
body: <p>I ask more in hope than expectation but is there anyway to import an excel spreadsheet into Matlab including the functions?</p>
  
  <p>The sheet I am looking to import in enormous and so will require a huge effort to replicate it in Matlab so I have to ask.</p>
  
  <p>I realise with the Excel add-in I can call excel from Matlab and vice versa. However one of the reasons that I am looking to import it into Matlab is that (due to it's immense size) the excel spreadsheet is really creaking (requiring 30s+ to do one update) so ideally I don't want to have them dynamically linked. I wonder however if I could use the link to import the data + forumlas? If someone has already done something similar I would love to see the code.</p>
  
  <p>Also as an aside will importing into Matlab give me any appreciable speed up compared to the basic excel sheet? (I have other reasons for wanting to do the import (such as the tremendous library of functions in Matlab) but it would be good to know, what kind of performance gain (if any) I can expect.</p>