Data Conversion

Doug and Scott are both Application Engineers at The MathWorks. MATLAB users since 1994, they get paid to live, eat, and breathe MATLAB! Each week, they highlight a submission from the File Exchange that they find useful or interesting. Doug (left) and Scott (right) at a recent conference

I am always trying new ways of teaching people how to use MATLAB. This week, I am trying a very graphical step by step method. I have made screenshots of every click along the path while importing data from an Excel file and getting a custom graph of that data out of MATLAB. [...]

This week’s pick comes from two of my colleagues in the UK, Sam and Marta. This is a cool visualization of the Earth and its moon at the proper ratio, but not the proper distance apart. The code is very simple, and one thing I liked about it is how they were able [...]

In the last few weeks I have been adding a some location information to this blog, from the map to the right that shows where all the weekly visits to this blog are coming from, to the map that was picked two weeks ago that shows where File Exchange authors are located in the world. [...]

I am currently doing a university tour as part of my role in Applications Engineering, so I have been thinking about the educational uses of MATLAB. Find me next week at University of North Texas and Texas A&M. I liked this simplified Page Rank algorithm that was posted here at MATLAB Central File Exchange. This struck [...]

We at The MathWorks are always trying to improve the experience of using MATLAB Central. Recently we have added: A new blog that talks about the MATLAB Desktop This covers how to use the desktop more effectively, like adding shortcuts and editor tricks. A new categorization of the files on the file exchange by industry and [...]

I like this little utility. I was fascinated by this kind of clock when my colleague brought one in to the office. See if you can figure it out before reading too much about it. This will be fun to put up on screen before seminars when I go on my “Educational [...]

Going through the e-mail this week, I was asked how to make a GUI with tab panels. I know that using a few special techniques, it is possible to build a tab panel using GUIDE. I figured someone on MATLAB Central would have written this common procedure up already. It turns out [...]

My colleague walked into my office with a MATLAB question, a regular pasttime for us here at the MathWorks. He wanted to take every combination of one value from each of three distinct vectors. Now, this could be done easily with some nested for loops, but that really does violate the spirit in [...]

My buddy and colleague Brett made this great little UI tool. It allows you to have a slider where you can see what the maximum, minimum and current values are. As John, the first reviewer of this file points out, this is a very common thing to do. I have reinvented this [...]

I enjoy reading The MathWorks News & Notes. Helen Chen has posted twenty articles from News & Notes to get them out to a wider audience. I am particularly fond of the article showing the growth of the MathWorks over the years, and of course the article about my main product, Distributed Computing, [...]