grpstats for non-numerical data

Hello Reading the grpstats documentation I realized I can easily count the number of elements that meet 2 conditions like this ( From matlab documentation):

My data is not numeric and a similar command results in an error. How can I count the number of elements that has D_S='0-30' & the damage rate is 'No Damage' ? My table is attached below

The first thing that comes to my mind is to substitute the strings with numbers, but I think there is better way! Thank you

Answer 1

[dpb]

Convert those variables to categorical which is what they are, really, not string. Then, internally to Matlab, they are numerical but the interface is still human-readable.)