Can't read Excel files on Linux

A user has a large number of excel files (.xlsx) to read using `xlsread`. These files open just fine with Excel, and using `xlsread` using R2017a on Windows. Using R2017a on Linux, the files are not recognised as valid Excel files. They will however open just fine with LibreOffice, and if they are re-saved once open in LibreOffice, they will open in MATLAB. Re-saving is not practical given the large number of files involved.

Windows:

>> [status,sheets,xlFormat]  = xlsfinfo('input_matrix_4.xlsx')
status =
    'Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet'
sheets =
  cell
    'Sheet1'
xlFormat =
    'xlOpenXMLWorkbook'

Linux:

>> [status,sheets,xlFormat]  = xlsfinfo('input_matrix_4.xlsx')
status =
  0×0 empty char array
sheets =
    'Unreadable Excel file: Could not open file /tmp/tpbb084cda_0a2d_463b_8ae0_46fe98df668a/docProps/app.xml. No such file or directory.'
xlFormat =
  0×0 empty char array

Is this a bug?

[Marc Compere]

I'm getting this same result in Ubuntu 18.04.4.

Looks like a feature.

[Gerard Capes]

I've just dug through my emails to find the resolution to this story :)

The files were generated by STATA, and it seems they weren't quite correct/valid Excel files. Saving them in Excel/LibreOffice was 'fixing' them which allowed MATLAB to read them. This is only a solution if you have a small number of files.

To read the files I had, MathWorks recommended I use readtable and table2array to load the xls files into a matrix.