Plot x axis in date format

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Nora Rafael
Nora Rafael on 17 Apr 2020
Commented: Peter Perkins on 27 Apr 2020
I want to load and plot a dataset, with the x-axis in date format:
When I make my plot using the below code:
data=xlsread('XXX.xlsx');
Date=data(:,1); %week start date
Y=data(:,4);
plot(Date,Y,'ob');
But I get a strange x-axis
How can I change the x-axis to the date format in the excel? and then to a number in months?
  3 Comments
Nora Rafael
Nora Rafael on 17 Apr 2020
Unfortunately I can't attach it :(
Could you give an example of how it can be implemented?
Peter Perkins
Peter Perkins on 27 Apr 2020
Based on your (I guess) screenshot of an excel spreadsheet, you have a mix of text and dates in that column of the spreadsheet. That's bad news. Strongly recommend that you clean that up before doing anything. Maybe you can clean it up in MATLAB, but better to deal with the source. I have no idea what you'd even get back in the numeric output from your call to xlsread.
Once you clean that up, stay away from xlsread, and use readtable. Depending on what version of MATLAB you are using, you may get datetimes automatically, or you may get text and have to convert. If you get a cell array that is a mix of text and numbers, you haven't cleaned up the file. In very recent versions of MATLAB, use readtimetable. At that point, you can just plot vs. the datetime. Muhammad shows that, although I think the file he's using is very different than what you have.

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Answers (2)

Mehmed Saad
Mehmed Saad on 17 Apr 2020
Take this as an example
T = readtable('Test.csv');
t= datetime(strrep(strrep(T.time,'T',' '),'Z',''));
figure,plot(t,T.long_E,'.')
In this example i converted the data i ve into time series so the plot is
  1 Comment
Mehmed Saad
Mehmed Saad on 17 Apr 2020
You can convert your excel datetime usinng the following format
datetime(Date,'Format','MM/dd/yyyy')
where Date must be in the form of string

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Ameer Hamza
Ameer Hamza on 17 Apr 2020

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