Importing date and time from an excel file to matlab

I have an excel file with data that looks like this

Date  Time  PM10 
5/29/14  6:01  0.148
5/29/14  6:03  0.148
5/29/14  6:05  0.121
5/29/14  6:07  0.123
5/29/14  6:09  0.169
5/29/14  6:11  0.129
5/29/14  6:13  0.124

I want to import it into matlab as table such that mytable.Date would be the first column, and mytable.Time would be second column in the same format as in the excel file and mytable.PM10 would be the third column. I am currently using this code.

PM10data = readtable('PM10 data June 2014 - September 2015.xlsx');

However, the output I get looks like this

'5/29/2014'  0.250775462962963  0.148000000000000
'5/29/2014'  0.252164351851852  0.148000000000000
'5/29/2014'  0.253553240740741  0.121000000000000
'5/29/2014'  0.254942129629630  0.123000000000000
'5/29/2014'  0.256331018518519  0.169000000000000
'5/29/2014'  0.257719907407407  0.129000000000000
'5/29/2014'  0.259108796296296  0.124000000000000

I realize that it converts the time into a datenum but I want it to be a string. How do I fix this? Thank you!

Answer 1

[Martin Schätz]

Hi, you can use datestr() function

>> datestr(0.250775462962963)

ans =

   6:01 AM

[saadatnk8]

Hi Martin, yes the datestr function works for one individual value, but if I do it for the whole array, I get the following error

Subscript indices must either be real positive integers or logicals.
Error in formatdate (line 158)
            month = char(strrep(month(dtvector(:,2)), '.', '')); %remove period
Error in dateformverify (line 32)
S = char(formatdate([y,mo,d,h,minute,s],dateformstr,islocal));
Error in datestr (line 194)
S = dateformverify(dtnumber, dateformstr, islocal);

I have further explained my problem in this question, please refer to this http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/250226-timestamp-not-converting-to-a-string

Answer 2

[Peter Perkins]

If you have R2014b or later, see my response to this very similar question.