Plot time sensitive data

Hello,

I imported two column vectors from a .xlsx file. The first one is called "Date", and contains the date and time of a corresponding measurement, in the format: 'yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss. The second vector contains the corresponding measurment on that timestamp, let's call it 'Height'.

I tried to plot these vectors with the standard 'plot(Date,Height)' function, to see the chance of height over time. Note that the time spans multiple years, and contains thousands of measurements.

But the plot returns a tangeled mess of a graph, where the data points seem to be connected randomly to each other. I am aware of the datetime datatype, and the option to convert timestamps into different formats, without sucess in using them. But how do I get a decently looking graph, with which I can see the chance in height over time?

Thanks in Advance!

[Mathieu NOE]

hello

maybe you should share your code along with a sample xlsx file

tx

[Peter Perkins]

Spaghetti like that usually indicates that the times are not sorted.

datetime plots work well. Import your data using readtimetable (or readtable and then table2timetable in earlier MATLAB versions) and call sortrows.

And, as Mathieu says, show a small sample of what you have.

[Tim Richter]

Sorting the tables helped, thanks!

[Bjorn Gustavsson]

For these types of long-term series there often are seasonal (and possibly daily) variations, to enhance those you might consider using plot3 or scatter3 where you have year on the x-axis, day of year on the y-axis and your height along the z-axis (and colour-scale).