Converting to quarterly time from xls

I have a excel(xls) data in which the first column is time variable (quarterly from 1978q1 to 2011q1).

How can I bring this into matlab and use the same format. (I will plot against other merged data.)

Help me! (I searched 'toquarterly' but its explaination is too short to fully understand. Any good explaination might be helpful!)

Answer 1

[Oleg Komarov]

You can import xls data with xlsread:

[data, text] = xlsread(filename,...);

EDIT

To convert cellstrings dates of the format yyyyq# into numeric representation, use:

datenum(text(:,1),'yyyyQQ')