XLSREAD reads EXCEL-files.
Currently, only a hack to read excel tables is implemented.
First, you need to convert your excel table into a tab-delimited
text file. Then you can use XLSREAD to load that file.

[NUM, STR] = XLSREAD(filename)
filename        tab-delimited text file
NUM contains numeric data
STR contains textual data

see also: STR2DOUBLE

Reference(s):