Nominal to useful without changing values

Part of my dataset is imported from an excel file, and several variables (with numeric values) were imported as cell strings. I need to convert the variable type to double so that I can run correlations with other variables.

I can convert to nominal type, but when I try to convert to a double or number (e.g. with 'double' or 'mat'), the values change (some becoming less than half of original value). Is there a way that I can convert the variable type while keeping the value of the variable for each observation, or do I need to re-import all of my data from excel one column at a time?

Answer 1

[Oleg Komarov]

a = '23';
str2num(a)
str2double(a)

[Jordan]

I tried your solution, but got the error

    Error using str2num (line 33)
Requires string or character array input.

The variable is showing up as a < 1271x1 cell>. I'm sorry if I used the wrong wording in my question--I'm very new to all of this!

[Oleg Komarov]

a = {'23','33'; '12','1'};

cellfun(@str2num,a)
str2double(a)

Both approached work, I would go for str2double.

Answer 2

[Azzi Abdelmalek]

here an example:

 A={'12' '45';'77' '15';'87' '524'} %your cell array
 result=cellfun(@(x) str2num(x),A)