A problem with the date structure

Dear all,

I load some data from an excel file and I obtain D={

 'dates'

 [40521]
    [40461]
    [40370]
    [40310]
    [40575]
    '30/01/11'
    '27/02/11'
    '27/03/11'
    '24/04/11'
    '22/05/11'
    '19/06/11'
    '17/07/11'
    '14/08/11'
    [40856]
    [40796]
    [40705]
};

I know that is has to do with the setting of excel and that I should format the dates.

Can I correct this problem within Matlab so as to have only this format '17/07/11' and not date numbers?

thanks

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

idx_to_change = cellfun(@isnumeric, D);
dateshift = 695422;   %1904 date system; 693960 for 1900 date system
D(idx_to_change) = cellstr( datestr( [D{idx_to_change}] + dateshift ) );

[salva]

thank you walter. Yet I obtain '12-Jun-2011' instead of 12/9/2011 and also these dates that are created are wrong.

any suggestions?

thanks

[salva]

I tried

 idx_to_change = cellfun(@isnumeric, D);
       dateshift =693960;   %1904 date system; 693960 for 1900 date system
zz = cellstr( datestr( [D{idx_to_change}] + dateshift ) );
newdates=datestr(zz, 'mm/dd/yy')
D(idx_to_change)=cellstr(newdates);

and it worked.

For some reason when I issue the command

newdates=datestr(zz, 'mm/dd/yy')

I obtain the output day/month/year which I should not expect as I have specified 'mm/dd/yy'

Why is this the case?

Could you please verify the correctness of the above code?

thanks

[Walter Roberson]

newdates = cellstr( datestr( [D{idx_to_change}] + dateshift, 'mm/dd/yy' ) );

[salva]

thank you:)