Matlab comes with a function called tdfread, which is one of the best functions for reading text files because it can handle numerical and textual data.
It reads textfiles with a header (to describe each column) and many rows of data. It surpasses Excel limitations with large number of rows.
tdfread creates a structure with as many fields as columns in the file, using column names as field names.

Unfortunately Matlab does not provide tdfwrite, so here it is.
It is as simple as tdfread and does exactly the opposite. It generates a textfile, creating a header with structure field names, then stores the data in textual format.

function tdfwrite(filename,st)

st is a structure created with st=tdfread('file.tab');
st is a structure with several fields. Each field is a vector of numbers or a matrix of char.

Example:
If the file textfile.tab is the following:
Latitude » Longitude » City
42.3584 » -71.0598 » Boston
40.4167 » -3.7003 » Madrid
41.8955 » 12.4823 » Rome

You can use
>> z=tdfread('textfile.tab');
>> tdfwrite('newfile.tab',z);

Then newfile.tab will look like this:
Latitude » Longitude » City
42.358400000000003 » -71.059799999999996 » Boston
40.416699999999999 » -3.7002999999999999 » Madrid
41.895499999999998 » 12.4823 » Rome