Why does MATLAB 6.5 (R13) not export NaN or Inf data types properly when used as an ActiveX client?

I am using MATLAB 6.5 (R13) as an ActiveX client to connet to Excel. I am trying to export a matrix created in MATLAB which has some of its elements as NaN's or Inf. When I export this matrix to Excel, the NaN's and Inf's get replaced by a number, 65535. I would like to know if NaN and Inf can be replaced by empty elements when exported by MATLAB activex client.

Answer 1

[MathWorks Support Team]

This change has been incorporated into the documentation in Release 2010a (R2010a). For previous releases, read below for any additional information:

As of MATLAB 7.0 (R14), the expected behavior is that Inf is exported as 65535 and NaN as an empty.

To export Inf as Inf, it must be exported as a string to Excel which implies that the double matrix must be converted to a cell array. See the below example:

% create a matrix with elements equal to Inf

a = floor( rand(10)*10 )

a(find(a == 1)) = Inf

% convert the matrix to a cell array

acell = num2cell(a);

% convert the cells to strings

astr = cellfun(@num2str, acell, 'UniformOutput', false);

xlswrite('temp.xls', astr)