Exported formulas on excel sheets resulted in text which would not be evaluated automatically

According to the past post, simply using xlswrite and writecell to export formula as text (char/string) will result in formulas in Excel.

Ex. Will it be possible to use XLSWRITE to write formulas to the excel sheet which would be calculated altomatically when they are written?

However executing the following on R2019a, Windows 10.

a={'1','2','=sum(a1,b1)'}
a(2,:)={'4' '5' '=sum(a2,b2)'}
a(3,:)={4, 5 ,'=sum(a3,b3)'}
% xlswrite('Book.xls',a)
writecell(a,'Book.xls')

creates the following.

Do we need any set-up on Excel side or is there anything that can be done from MATLAB side? Using ActiveX is of course an option, but I'm looking for simpler option.

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

That post does not say that the formulas will be executable once written by xlswrite.

None of the table based operations such as writetable or writecell are able to create executable formulas. You will need to use ActiveX methods.

[michio]

I see. The phase in the title of the question "which would be calculated altomatically when they are written?" got me think that the formulas will be executable..

[michio]

It turns out that using xlswrite to save .xlsx does the job (at least at my end on R2019b)

a={'1','2','=sum(a1,b1)'}
a(2,:)={'4' '5' '=sum(a2,b2)'}
a(3,:)={4, 5 ,'=sum(a3,b3)'}
xlswrite('Book.xlsx',a)

[Walter Roberson]

I did not expect that.

[Image Analyst]

So I guess the key is to have an extension of .xlsx rather than .xls.

[michio]

It was indeed for xlswrite, but neither of them works (as in the formulas executable) with writecell.

[michio]

Setting 'UseExcel' to true resolves the issue with writecell.

a={'1','2','=sum(a1,b1)'}
a(2,:)={'4' '5' '=sum(a2,b2)'}
a(3,:)={4, 5 ,'=sum(a3,b3)'}
writecell(a,'Book.xls','UseExcel',true)

[Alex Calder]

So do I understand correctly, that there is no solution for environments without Excel installed? I have a managed Linux environment that uses Open Office, rather than Excel.