Has Matlab Help become less helpful?

Is it me or has Matlab Help and documentation become less helpful? In previous versions, I could search and find functions much more easily. I can't put my finger on exactly what has changed, but can give an example.

In older Matlab versions, it was much easier to search for a list of functions. Type 'str' into search, and a list of string functions would be found. Now it seems virtually impossible to get simple lists like this.

I realize that search results can be filtered by toolbox, product, etc., but it's not the same ... certainly not as helpful. Even the individual help pages have become obtuse and less like previously 'friendly' Matlab help. Again, difficult to quantify. I guess I could summarize by saying the help has become more like a general programming language help.

Any suggestions? Am I missing something?

[Adam Danz]

Matlab has more functions and toolboxes now. But despite that, I find Matlab documentation to be one of the benefits of this product over competitors. Matlab documentation is centralized and it's pages are often interconnected via web links to similar topics. Compare that to Python documentation which is quite distributed. The docmentation almost always contains helpful examples and links to similar functions. And they often include a summary of algorithms used in function files that we do not have access to - even citations to journal publications.

The one weakness I've complained about in Matlab documentation is their lack of explanation/interpretation for the results of many of their statistical tests. I'm aware that it's not Matlab's job to teach statistics but often times there are multiple approaches to a statistical test and when we only have a numeric result, it's not easy to determine how to interpret that result without having to go through the source code which is quite a burden to some users - especially those who are weak on coding and statistics. I think interpretation of statistical results should be included in the documentation. But that rant is another topic.

Answer 1

[Image Analyst]

Here's what I see for your example:

139 functions that deal with strings (probably because they have an example where they use str as a variable name). If you're looking for functions that start with "str" then I agree that is not easy to get, or even possible. If you type in "str*" into the search field, you get thousands of hits. Was it better in older versions? Please show a screenshot if you can.

[Skip]

I finally found a computer with an older version of Matlab. Here is an example of one feature of previous help, that I do not find in current help. A list of functions for a given category. Is this available in the current documentation?

[Steven Lord]

I'm going to use the online documentation (https://www.mathworks.com/help/) for this demonstration. But you can do this with the documentation in an installed version of MATLAB.

When I search for the two words "linear equations" I find almost 1500 hits. But since that page in which you're interested is part of the MATLAB documentation, I'll Refine by Product to select only the 73 hits in MATLAB.

The first two hits are "Systems of Linear Equations" and "Linear Algebra". The first of those is a page that describes systems of linear equations and how to solve them in prose. The second of those is (https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/linear-algebra.html?searchHighlight=linear%20equations&s_tid=doc_srchtitle). That has a list of functions that are relevant for linear algebra. Not all of the functions from the list you posted are in the same section of that page (since the documentation has been reordered a bit in the six years since release R2013b), but all of them do appear on the page. There are also many more functions, some of which have been introduced in the past six years.

I'd also like to point out that at the top of the page, in the blue bar with the word Documentation on its left edge, there are selectors All, Examples, and Functions. If you're just interested in the list of functions associated with that category select Functions and all 68 will be shown. You can filter on how many support various extended capabilities like GPU Arrays (39 of the 68) or C/C++ Code Generation (47 of 68.) Four support tall arrays, C/C++ Code Generation, GPU Code Generation, GPU Arrays, and Distributed Arrays: the core linear algebra functions mldivide, mrdivide, svd, and mtimes.

[Skip]

Thank for your reply. Your method of searching for functions is much better than how I was searching. Much appreciated!