Question about error triggered by 'xlsread'

Dear all,

I have a question about 'xlsread' which is about reading excel files into MATLAB.

Recently, my boss changed the OS to Win7, and installed Office 2010 with MATLAB 2010a. However, 'xlsread' posed error message as below

??? Error: Object returned error code: 0x800AC472

Error in ==> xlsread at 241
    Excel.DisplayAlerts = 0;

Previously, when the OS is Winxp with Office 2007, there was no problem in using 'xlsread'. Sometimes, there is no error message when exeucuting 'xlsread'. But in order to avoid the error message, what should I do?

I had referred to some post which suggest converting excel into csv and use csvread, but I do not want to use it as csvread cannot read the first line of string.

Thanks for your kind attention.