MATLAB plot: automatically using a column variable (Name) as Display Name in the legend

Question

So I have a series of temperature loggers which all have a specific name and I want to plot them as follows:

Now, as you can see in the example plot I added, the legend automatically labels the lines as data1, data2, data3,... . However, I need the legend to show the names of the loggers. Because there are many loggers, I need MATLAB to do it automatically because it would take hours to use DisplayName and type in every logger name manually. Does anyone know how I can chose a column in my data table as the name for my lines? My table is built as follows:

Name of logger 1| Date | Temperature | Name of logger 2 | Date | Temperature % and so on

This is part of the code I use for the plots:

hold on
for i=2:2:35
   plot(data{:,1}, data{:,i})
end
hold off

structure of the

Answer 1

You can use the DisplayName argument of plot , together with dynamically retrieving the table variable names, to do this automatically.

vNames = data.Properties.VariableNames;
for ii = 2:2:35
    plot( data{:,1}, data{:,ii}, 'DisplayName', vNames{ii} );
end

Now when you call legend , the series will be named according to the table variable names.

---

Note that once you've got the variable names, you can equivalently index the table with them (instead of ii directly) like so:

vNames = data.Properties.VariableNames;
for ii = 2:2:35
    plot( data.Date, data.(vNames{ii}), 'DisplayName', vNames{ii} );
end