Painting a circular graph by script written in Matlab using Excel. Working with COM\VBA - matlab

Question

I need to write a script in Matlab, which will read some data from Excel table and paint a circular graph in Matlab's figure. However I was adviced to paint it using Excel facilities. It's not hard to paint a circular graph in Excel but I still haven't found any way to make it work from Matlab, using Matlab's figure. I've already asked this question on other forums but haven't receive any answer. I'll be very grateful for any help.

Answer 1

So, I figured out how to use ActiveX control in Matlab's figure.
Firstly, you need to install driver mschrt20.ocx (is free and available to download from the internet). In 32-bit system you must put it in C:/System32 then install it by typing 'regsvr32 mschrt20.ocx' in cosole (as Administrator).
Then create a Matlab figure and put an ActiveX object to it, save. To activate it type to Matlab's interpretator something like this:
anyone = actxcontrol('MSChart20Lib.MSChart.2');
anyone.get;
get(anyone,'ChartData')
Now you could see all the properties of the object. In guide choose the right property 'charType' and make field 'Legend' 'Visible' if you need it.
To paint a pie chart using your ActiveX object you need to set the meaning of it's field 'ChartData'. It's a cell 2xn. Use it as in the example below:
S = cell(2, 3);
S(1,: ) = {'first', 'second', 'third'} ; %legend
S(2,: ) = {1, 10, 5} ; %meanings
set(handles.activex1,'ChartData', S);
That's how it works. There some other abilities available with ActiveX control.

Answer 2

There are a lot of ways to understand your question:
If you want a pie chart, matlab can do that with the 'pie' function:
http://www.mathworks.com/help/techdoc/ref/pie.html
x = [1 3 0.5 2.5 2];
explode = [0 1 0 0 0];
pie(x,explode)
colormap jet
If you wanted to actually plot a circle, then you would use the 'rectangle' command with 'Curvature' settings like this:
rectangle('Position',[1,2,5,10],'Curvature',[1,1],...
'FaceColor','r')
daspect([1,1,1])
xlim([0,7])
ylim([1,13])
Or you could look at these sites for alternatives for drawing a circle:
http://blogs.mathworks.com/pick/2008/03/21/drawing-a-circle/
http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/2876
If instead you wanted polar axes:
http://www.mathworks.com/help/techdoc/ref/polar.html
figure
t = 0:.01:2*pi;
polar(t,sin(2*t).*cos(2*t),'--r')
The following is the equation for a circle (and so you'll see a red circle overlaid over the black polar plot axes:
polar(t,sin(t).^2+cos(t).^2,'--r')