About to begin learning MATLAB on my own

Question

so essentially I have the task to learn matlab decently well in the next few weeks, and I want to really be able to impress the people i'm learning it for, so if you guys have advice, I would greatly appreciate it.

What I'm dealing with Throughout the course of my job I will be dealing largely in two areas.

1. Formatting and importing data from excel
2. Interpreting the data in a meaningful way.

I realize the second category is extremely broad, but essentially i'm working with arrays of pricing information to set some standard price for a commodity, so the analysis that I will be doing will be less computationally heavy and will focus more on error getting the data in correctly and accurately and making sure all of the functions that I want to perform are executed correctly. Very basic stuff.

So here's what I'm looking for:

1. What are the most important topics so that I can import data from excel into matlab perfectly?

2. What should I study just to get basic functions down that will be applied to entire matrices/arrays?

3. What should I study prior to studying anything else to get a firm foundation in the subject? (So I don't make stupid syntax errors, etc.)?

Your help is greatly appreciated :)

Answer 1

Perhaps you have gained the MATLAB skills you need now, but hopefully this will help someone following the same path later.

The Math Works (developers of MATLAB) run a site called MATLAB Cody.

This site offers a range of problems and a web based MATLAB interpreter so you can test your solutions. When you have a correct solution, you can compare with other solutions to the same problem. Then you can look up the functions others have used in the online MATLAB documentation for more understanding.

The problems focus on regular expressions and cell manipulation which will be very relevant to importing and manipulating Excel data.

Answer 2

Since you will be using excel it is likely the data you import could come out in cell format. Look into the differences between indexing using matrices and cells. Also, learn early on the difference between [operator] and .[operator] for vector calculations. The second one is element-wise and will most likely solve a lot of issues you'll come across if your records are meant to only relate to one row/column of data

Answer 3

The first two things you'll want to learn about are (1) the Matlab GUI and (2) the basics of Matlab syntax. A quick visit to the Getting Started section of the Matlab documentation will do you wonders. It should take you less than a day to get through the basics. Do note that the Matlab documentation is generally excellent, and you should use it often.

Beyond that, there are a number of questions here about importing Excel into Matlab (importing from excel, exporting to excel), and there's some excellent docs on the Mathworks site as well (xlsread, xlswrite). Read them and become familiar with the details and common problems. Good luck!