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Starting MATLAB

• Prerequisites and Expectations for the Tutorial
• A Very Elementary MATLAB Tutorial
• Starting MATLAB
• Running the Demos
• Getting Help
• Creating Variables
• Performing Calculations
• Visualizing Data
• Creating Scripts with MATLAB Editor/Debugger
• Saving Variables and Sessions
• Working with Files, Directories and Paths

You can start MATLAB by double-clicking on the MATLAB icon or invoking the application from the Start menu of Windows. The main MATLAB window, called the MATLAB Desktop, will then pop-up and it will look like this:

Click on image to see enlarged view.

You will notice that inside the MATLAB command window is the text:

To get started, select "MATLAB Help" from the Help menu.

The "" is called the command prompt, and there will be a blinking cursor right after it waiting for you to type something. The idea is that you type commands at the command prompt for MATLAB to execute; after you type a command at a command prompt, MATLAB executes the command you typed in, then prints out the result. It then prints out another command prompt and waits for you to enter another command. In this way, you can interactively enter as many commands to MATLAB as you want.

Later lessons will go into a lot of detail about particular MATLAB commands, but for now, just to get you started, let's enter a simple MATLAB command, the date command. Click the mouse where the blinking cursor is and then type date and hit the enter key. MATLAB should then return something like

date

ans =
01-Jan-2008

where the current date should be returned to you instead of 01-Jan-2008. Congratulations! You have just successfully executed your first MATLAB command!

Another simple command you can try now is the clc command (clear command window). In the MATLAB command window, if you want to clear away all the visible text and have the cursor move to the top of the window, then type clc at the command prompt. Go ahead and try it now to see what happens. That was simple, wasn't it?

One final note, when you are all done with your MATLAB session you need to exit MATLAB. To exit MATLAB, simply click the mouse on the File menu of the MATLAB command window and then select "Exit MATLAB" (alternatively, you could just enter quit at the MATLAB command prompt).

Continue on to the next lesson.