MATLAB^® provides tools to acquire, visualize, and analyze data.

With MATLAB, you can gain insight into your data in a fraction of the time it would take using spreadsheets or traditional programming languages.

You can import data into MATLAB from files such as Excel^®, text, or image files, from databases, and from external devices.

Many files can be imported interactively, such as this mixed numeric and text file.

Here the import tool helps you specify what data you want to bring in as well as the format of the data.

You can auto-generate MATLAB code to capture the steps required for the import. This allows you to repeat the process on this or other similar files.

You can also choose to import your data programmatically. File I/O functions let you work with data files in any format.

Now that your data is in MATLAB, you can use the built-in plotting functions to visualize and understand your data. Here we plot the data using the Plots tab in the MATLAB Toolstrip. The plot can be customized interactively using the plot tools. You can also perform customizations programmatically.

To see the many ways you can display data graphically with MATLAB, you can visit the MATLAB Plot Gallery where you can view and download examples for a variety of plot types.

You can also manage, filter, and pre-process your data in MATLAB.

MATLAB provides functions for filtering and smoothing, interpolation, convolution, and fast Fourier transforms (FFTs). Here we identify all the data that has a value of 999, an indicator that we have a broken sensor. We use interpolation to replace the missing temperature values.

Using MATLAB, you can uncover trends, test assumptions, and build descriptive models.

Add-on products provide capabilities for curve and surface fitting, multivariate statistics, spectral analysis, image analysis, and many other analysis tasks.

Here we use Curve Fitting Toolbox™ to fit a custom model to our data.

You can document and share results as plots or as complete reports.

You can capture your analysis in a single script or function and generate a report directly from it. The report will contain your MATLAB code, any comments, as well as the results from running the program, including plots.

Here we’ve published to an HTML file, but reports can be published in a variety of other formats, including PDF, Word, or LaTeX.

For more information, return to the MATLAB product page or watch one of the other videos.