Excel 5 Dimensional arrays - arrays

Question

How do I make a 5D array in excel? I have to later shift it to Matlab as a 5D single array. I have large amounts of EEG data that I need to sort into arrays.

Answer 1

Are you asking for help on VBA, or looking for help on how to encode a 5D array in an Excel sheet? This answer assumes the latter. There are many ways to do this, but here are two options (not necessarily good options, but hopefully they will help you think creatively about the problem).
(1) If the array is sparse, you can store the data in an excel sheet as a list of tuples of the form (dim1, dim2, dim3, dim4, dim5, value), preceded by the dimensionality of the array. For example, your Excel sheet could contain the following data:
5 9 9 7 8
1 2 9 6 4 10.1
4 9 3 7 2 18.9
3 2 1 7 8 19.2
and the corresponding MATLAB array would be defined as follows (assuming you want empty values to be NaNs):
mat = NaN(5, 9, 9, 7, 8);
mat(1, 2, 9, 6, 4) = 10.1;
mat(4, 9, 3, 7, 2) = 18.9;
mat(3, 2, 1, 7, 8) = 19.2;
(2) You can store the array as a simple list of values, again preceded by the array's dimensionality. The list could be indexed canonically based on how MATLAB vectorizes arrays. For example, your Excel sheet could contain the following data:
5 9 9 7 8
11.3
14.2
25.5
18.9
<etc.>
and the corresponding MATLAB array would be defined as follows (again assuming you want empty values to be NaNs):
mat = NaN(5, 9, 9, 7, 8);
mat(1) = 11.3;
mat(2) = 14.2;
mat(3) = 25.5;
mat(4) = 18.9;
<etc.>
Of course, in both cases, you can automate the loading of the matrices from Excel into MATLAB, using MATLAB functions such as xlsread and reshape.
And also there is nothing special about Excel files for the way I'm interpreting your question; if you want to go this route then CSV files might be a better option for storing the data.