How can I add month labels to the x-axis of my plot?

I have a series of data (in excel) which contains a data point for every three hour period over a year. I have imported the data into MATLAB and want to plot the data and have labels on the x-axis displaying the month of the different sections of data. Unfortunately the 'Date' column in the excel file is not complete, with some gaps, and two years of data interspersed such that sections of the data during a 'month' were recorded in different years.

Sample Data:
12/01/1979  03:03:00  1.62  3.49
12/01/1979  06:07:00  1.76  3.14
          09:00:00  1.395  3.44 *Missing date
          12:00:00  1.395  3.44
12/01/1979  14:56:59  1.03  3.74
12/01/1979  18:01:00  0.78  5.12
12/01/1979  21:01:00  0.57  3.28
13/01/1979  00:03:00  0.47  2.99
13/01/1979  03:03:00  0.54  3.51
13/01/1979  06:07:00  0.61  3.23
13/01/1980  09:04:00  0.5  3.86 *Change of year
13/01/1980  12:03:59  0.53  4.05

For the above data, as an example, I would like to plot one of the final columns and display a label of 'January' below it.

[Azzi Abdelmalek]

Just one label?

[Ben]

I would like to be able to have all the months plotted on the same graph, as a year long sequence (as opposed to a line for each month) and have the name of the month display below the relevant section of data. Instead of having tick marks for the length along the vector, I would like a tick mark to denote the start/end of each month, with the month name in between.

Answer 1

[Naomi]

For labelling the ticks as months, I came up with:

set(gca, 'xtick', 1:13);

set(gca,'xticklabel', {[ blanks(25) 'Jan'], [ blanks(25) 'Feb'], [ blanks(25) 'Mar'],[ blanks(25) 'Apr'],[ blanks(25) 'May'], ... [ blanks(25) 'Jun'],[ blanks(25) 'Jul'], [ blanks(25) 'Aug'], [ blanks(25) 'Sep'], [ blanks(25) 'Oct'],[ blanks(25) 'Nov'], [ blanks(25) 'Dec'], ''});

You'll need to play with the number of blank spaces you need for your particular axis size ...