Tip for loading Excel Spreadsheet into Octave on Mac

[Henry F. Mollet]

There may be more sophisticated ways to get an Excel Spreadsheet into Octave
on Mac but this works for me and I don't have to explicitly change the
carriage return (\r) of Mac OS into newline (\n) of Unix. I suggest that
this is suitable for medium sized data matrices, which would be cumbersome
to enter in octave at the command line prompt but not that large that a
spreadsheet wouldn't really work either.

Copy your spreadsheet (I'm using Excel) and paste it into BBEdit Lite 6.1
for OS X. BBEdit has a Unix save/save as option. Octave will load this file:

octave:83> load Test&testfile
octave:84> whos
*** local user variables:
prot  type                       rows   cols  name
====  ====                       ====   ====  ====
 rwd  matrix                       39      7  Test_testfile
Octave even takes care of the "&" in the filename and renames the matrix but
it cannot handle a space.

Now the name of the matrix "Test_testfile" can be changed to say
"InputMatrix" (so it will the same as in the script which will use the file)
octave:92> InputMatrix=Test_testfile

Now the file can be saved with the same name *in octave*
octave:94> save Test&testfile InputMatrix

BBEdit will even automatically amend the file with
# Created by Octave 2.1.46, Wed Feb 04 18:50:05 2004 PST
<address@hidden>
# name: InputMatrix
# type: matrix
# rows: 39
# columns: 7
Henry



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