MATLAB For Dummies

Chapter 11

Importing and Exporting Data

In This Chapter

Obtaining data from other sources

Outputting data to other recipients

Interacting with image data

An application isn’t of much use if it can’t interact with data — in the case of MATLAB, the variables, formulas, scripts, functions, and plots that you create. In fact, even applications that you might think have nothing to do with data manage quite a lot of it. For example, you might be tempted to think that games don’t work with data, but even the lowliest Solitaire game saves statistics, which means that it interacts with data. So you can easily see that most applications interact with at least their own data.

Larger, more complex applications, such as MATLAB, also need some method of interacting with data from other applications. For example, you may need to use Excel data from a buddy to perform a calculation. If MATLAB didn’t provide a means to access that data, to import it into MATLAB, you couldn’t use it to perform the calculation.

After you complete the calculation, you may need to send it back to your buddy, but the only application available at the other site is Excel. Now you must export the data from MATLAB into ...