At the moment I am using xlsread to open a set of data that I have in excel with given timestamps. But when these values are placed in matlab it changes the formatting of the timestamp. In excel it is: dd/mm/yyyy HH:MM
but when it puts it into matlab it changes it to
mm/dd/yyyy HH:MM
which ruins my other code. I have tried using formatIn and specifying it, but then it returns an error if no value for midnight is given.
Any help would be appreciated.
You can use datenum and datestr to convert the format to what you want. In the following example I'm assuming your timestamps are contained in a cell array of strings, but it also works if it's a char matrix:
>> timestamps = {'08/25/2014 13:14'; '08/26/2014 14:15'} %// mm/dd/yyyy HH:MM
>> result = datestr(datenum(timestamps, 'mm/dd/yyyy HH:MM'), 'dd/mm/yyyy HH:MM')
result =
25/08/2014 13:14
26/08/2014 14:15
What Luis recommended should help you to get any format that you like. However there is something important to realize here:
Excel does not 'have' the date in your format. It has the date stored as a number like 123546.123 and presents it to you in a certain way.
If you want to get the date in exactly the way that excel presents it, the trick is to avoid importing the relevant column as a date, but just import it as text instead.
How to do this depends on your import method, but it should not be very hard.
