How to creat a dataset include dates? like airline dataset?

the examples given in econometric toolbox usually load dataset directly, like

load Data_Airline

But in reality usually we read data from excel files or other resources, which contains data with double format and text with cell format.like:

[ndata, text, alldata] = xlsread('uscpi.xlsx');

And the dates are expressed like '1980/4/1' in the text cell. The question is ,how can I construct a dataset like Airline from read excel file? Thanks.

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

datenum() can be used to parse dates that are in text format.

Caution: if you use the binary dates that Excel returns then they will not correspond exactly to MATLAB dates. See http://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/import_export/when-to-convert-dates-from-excel-files.html