TABLE OF CONTENTS Matlab is an extremely powerful tool for the types of work we do, and yet many of us are not familiar with this tool. This is an introduction to the most fundamental operations in Matlab. If Matlab is not available to you, a fallback is Octave; however, scripts may have to be tweaked to get them to run on Octave. If you, like many, have been trying to do math in spreadsheets, you will find Matlab very refreshing.
When you first start Matlab, it expects to be working in some standard directory. If you accept that and try to do all your work there, that directory soon gets so full of junk that it becomes unmanageable. You have alternatives.
In some ways Matlab acts like a DOS window. You can use several of the standard navigation commands such as cd and dir. Apparently it does not go to the operating system for execution of these commands, because it also responds to the Unix commands ls and pwd. If you attempt to use the extensions in either language, such as dir /p or ls a, it will not recognize those extensions.
To start out, you open the directory in Windows in which you intend to work. I presume you have your system set up so that the address of the directory is displayed at the top of the directory window. Highlight that address and type
