how to plot the time series data with dates showing in x axis

Hi all, I am trying to plot the monthly time series in the same graph with x axis representing month of year and y axis the time series of data1 and data2 . In the original excel file tss.xlsx are 3 sheets, each has one column(303 rows) of data with names as sheet1:dates( from 07.1990 to 09.2015), sheet2: data1, sheet3:data2. Data is shown as below

tss=
    1990/7/31  1.007180601  0.955050804
    1990/8/31  0.986132061  0.930056005
    1990/9/28  1.143781772  0.944318813
    1990/10/31  1.180854071  0.970127084
    1990/11/30  1.144684607  0.926718054
    1990/12/31  0.958882349  0.870540688
    ....
    2015/7/30  0.800130487  0.819143168
    2015/8/31  0.787216726  0.862432198
    2015/9/28  0.904850084  0.948935783

I first import the data into matlab and further run the codes as follows

dates=xlsread('tss.xlsx','dates');
data1=xlsread('tss.xlsx','data1');
data2=xlsread('tss.xlsx','data2');
plot(tss(1:303,1),data1,tss(1:303,1),data2)
datetick('x', 'mmmyy', 'keeplimits', 'keepticks')
legend('ts of data1','ts of data2')
grid on
grid minor

I am not satisfied with plotting 1) The x axis does show every year.. I need an x.axis which is labeled from year 1990 to year 2015, with grid of 1 year only. 2) The x axis begins from year 1987 and ends at 2020, but I want the plotting to start in 1990 and ends at 2015. Could you help me to figure out the above questions please? Thank you very much.

Best Jessie

Answer 1

[Titus Edelhofer]

Hi Jessie,

you need to set those properties as you want them to be before calling datetick:

t = datenum(1990, 1, 1):25:datenum(2015, 12, 15);
plot(t, rand(size(t)));
xlim([datenum(1990,1,1) datenum(2015, 12, 31)])
set(gca, 'xtick', datenum(1990:2015, 1, 1))
datetick('x', 'mmmyy', 'keeplimits', 'keepticks')

should do about what you want (or if not give hints how to get there :)).

Titus