MATLAB Programming Fundamentals - MathWorks

Create and Work with Tables

This example shows how to create a table from workspace variables, work with table

data, and write tables to files for later use. table is a data type for collecting

heterogeneous data and metadata properties such as variable names, row names,

descriptions, and variable units, in a single container.

Tables are suitable for column-oriented or tabular data that are often stored as columns in

a text file or in a spreadsheet. Each variable in a table can have a different data type, but

must have the same number of rows. However, variables in a table are not restricted to

column vectors. For example, a table variable can contain a matrix with multiple columns

as long as it has the same number of rows as the other table variables. A typical use for a

table is to store experimental data, where rows represent different observations and

columns represent different measured variables.

Tables are convenient containers for collecting and organizing related data variables and

for viewing and summarizing data. For example, you can extract variables to perform

calculations and conveniently add the results as new table variables. When you finish your

calculations, write the table to a file to save your results.

Create and View Table

Create a table from workspace variables and view it. Alternatively, use the Import Tool or

the readtable function to create a table from a spreadsheet or a text file. When you

import data from a file using these functions, each column becomes a table variable.

Load sample data for 100 patients from the patients MAT-file to workspace variables.

load patients

whos

Name Size Bytes Class Attributes

Age 100x1 800 double

Diastolic 100x1 800 double

Gender 100x1 12212 cell

Height 100x1 800 double

LastName 100x1 12416 cell

Location 100x1 15008 cell

SelfAssessedHealthStatus 100x1 12340 cell

Smoker 100x1 100 logical

Systolic 100x1 800 double

Weight 100x1 800 double

9 Tables