Question: reading ascii spreadsheets in Maple, getting R's read.table functionality in Maple

Hi!

I'mtrying to use Maple's statistic and linear algebra packages to get a functionality similar R. The biggest problem that I have currently is to find an easy/simple way to import and access data from tables/spreadheets in ascii notation (essentially what read.table(<filename>, <options>) gives you in R). I tried to use something like M:=ImportMatrix(<filename>) for that, which actually reads a table, but I don't know how to use to access/use the data in M. One problem seems to be that the data type of the matrix M is anything. So how to I convert anything into real numbers or strings? Also how I have no idea how to handle columns names.

I'd appreciate any help or hints (ideally some example). I browsed the documentation but I couldn't really find or get to work anything that does exactly what I want. In particular I do not want an interactive dialog (like some of the stuff for Excel sheets), but rather a relative simple non interactive way possible consisting of ImportMatrix and a few more statements that together give me roughly the functionally i get from read.table in R.