title: Using xlsread in MATLAB to read number and string data
body: <p>I have a large column of data in Excel that I'd like to read into a string cell array. However, some of the entries are numbers, and the rest are strings. So I have something like</p>
  
  <pre><code>288537
  288537
  312857
  589889
  589889
  1019503
  1019503
  1098802
  1098802
  abc
  efg
  hij
  1992724
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The first row is a header row, so we ignore that. When I use </p>
  
  <pre><code>[~, ID] = xlsread('data.xlsx', 'A2:A125581')
  </code></pre>
  
  <p><code>ID</code> contains only the string entries, not the numeric entries. </p>
  
  <p>How can I get <code>xlsread</code> to treat the numbers as strings, so I can read everything as a string?</p>