How to make contents of a row as the name of the variables of a data table?

Hi! I have 70 columns in a data table that I imported from an excel file. The header/title for each column is in a row, but not as an actual variable name. So matlab gave it the default variable names (var1, var2...varN etc.). I want to replace the default names with the actual variable names that are in a specific row (say 40). is there a straighforward way to do this?

I tried the command below to change the variable names of the table but it threw an error. I tried parenthesis and curly brackets instead of the square brackets but it still won't work. Not sure what's wrong.

T.Properties.Variablenames = ['new_name1', 'new_name2',....]

Error using dataset/subsasgnDot

Unknown dataset property: VariableNames.

Error in indexing (line 84)

a = subsasgnDot(a,s,b);

Answer 1

[Cris LaPierre]

To be variable names, your row must either contain character arrays or strings. See here.

You assign the names using the syntax below.

% cell array of character vectors
T.Properties.VariableNames = {'name1','name2',...}
% or string array
T.Properties.VariableNames = ["name1","name2",...]
% if row 40 of the table T contains character or strings
T.Properties.VariableNames = T{40,:}

[Maibam]

Hi Cris. Thanks for the response.

The command data1.Properties.VariableNames = data1{41,:}; worked and it's the quickest alternative for my case here. However, for this to work I had to convert my dataset to table. Briefly, glancing over the difference between dataset and table, lokks like they are very similar and wondering why the same command wont apply to a dataset? I am a new Matlab user so this may be a silly question.

[Cris LaPierre]

I didn't realize you were working with a dataset and not a table. I haven't looked into the differences, but they are different data types so I would not expect them to have the same properties.

I do want to point out that tables are the preferred approach. From the dataset doc page:

The dataset data type is not recommended. To work with heterogeneous data, use the MATLAB® table data type instead. See MATLAB table documentation for more information.