Unable to Sort Mixed Data Type Cell array

Hi! I have a cell array with 5 column which has time series data in it. just to give a quick background I initially had 5 variables some double and some string and I concatenated them. To make one cell array. I used the following

new=[Data_Number,Date,num2cell(xyz),num2cell(Software),num2cell(abs_time)]

Now, the reason why i did this was beacuse of this issue

'2017-03-19' 736773.803

'2017-03-19' 736773.8048

'2017-03-19' 736773.834

'2017-03-20' 736773.8374

'2017-03-20' 736773.9578

'2017-03-20' 736773.9617

'2017-03-19' 736773.9687

'2017-03-19' 736774.0073

'2017-03-19' 736774.0122

'2017-03-19' 736774.0174

'2017-03-20' 736774.047

So, here if you see while logging the data it went from 19th to 20 and then came back to 19. So I thought I will use abs time and sort that and change the corresponding 5 columns with it.(Sorry I could show only 2 column here but there are 3 more).

I tried something like this:

sortrows(new,5);

abstime is in 5th column.

But since I have made this cell with different data types I am somehow not able to alter the whole cell based on one column.

Please can any one help me with it.

Answer 1

[Guillaume]

Other solution, convert your cell array to a table. Use sortrows.

tnew = cell2table(new);   
sortrows(tnew, 5)

You don't even need to bother with the cell array

tnew = table(Data_Number ,Date, xyz, Software, abs_time);
sortrows(tnew, 5)

[sc1991]

you my friend just saved my day. Thanks a lot for the help. Thank you