How to Ignore Excel Headers in Mathematica for Statistical Analysis?

[nkormanik]

Excel Headers --> Mathematica

I have a large Excel .xls file. Miniature version shown below:

Test1 Test2
75 64
58 85
81 55
64 63
70 94
88 90
78 96
96 98
54 97
75 61

I would like to do some statistical analysis on the file in Mathematica 8.0.4.

Additionally I am using Mathematica Link for Excel 3.5.

The issue I'm now attempting to address concerns the "headers," or "column labels."

I need to tell Mathematica to disregard the headers. I want to use each respective header, however, as the name for the "variable stream" (Mathematica-speak for each column of data.)

What might be the best ways of dealing with such headers?

Thanks.

Nicholas Kormanik

 

[NateD]

One way to do this is to use the Import command in Mathematica. You can specify the option "HeaderLines" to tell Mathematica to ignore the header lines and assign each column of data a variable name. For example, you could use the following command: data = Import["ExcelFile.xls", "Data", HeaderLines->1]This will store the data from your Excel file into a variable called "data" and ignore the header line. The columns of data will be assigned variable names "Test1" and "Test2". You can then use data[[All,"Test1"]] to access the data in the first column and data[[All,"Test2"]] to access the data in the second column.