How to import timestamp from excel

I have a large data set and the first and second column are date and time followed by other parameter readings. When i import this excel into MATLAB, the timestamp, for example: 0:00:02 gets imported as 2e-5. How do I format it to say 0:00:02 or something more proper so that i can plot the data?

Thanks for the help

Answer 1

[Azzi Abdelmalek]

If your time vector is in the first column for example

[a,b,c]=xlsread('d1.xlsx')
out=datestr(a(:,1),'HH:MM:SS')

[jchris14]

Thank you for your help! it works!

Answer 2

[Bradley]

Just a bump, updated for Matlab 2022b:

To read data from an Excel file which includes time stamps, a couple of things: datestr is obsolete, and datatime is preferred. However, I had issues using datetime directly. Instead, I did it like this, for data contained in a range from A1 to Z100, with the time stamps contained in column A:

full_data = readtable(filename,'Sheet','Sheet Name','Range','A1:Z100','ReadVariableNames',0);

time_data = table2array(full_data(:,1));

% Note: table2array seems to automatically detect the source format by default, so the answer comes in as datetime

From there, you can do any normal thing... I found a couple of follow-up things like this:

dt = seconds(mean(diff(time_data)));

time_max = seconds(time_data(end) - time_data(1));

sim_time = 0:dt:time_max;

I'm sure the table2array call has some default 'opts' which make the formatting just happen to work out nicely for me. I didn't bother to dig deeper on that.

Thanks!