how do i "re attach" row id column vectors(made up of words) to the numeric value columns, matlab separates my data???

example of my data; column1= jim01, john18, jane43. column 2= 4.5, 3.05, 7.5. column3= 1.5,5.0,9.0... when i input the data into matlab, it separates the id column( the column with words) from the numeric data...i am making scatterplots of columns 2 & 3. i brush the graph and only get back the values...i need to get back the row id that the values represent

[Walter Roberson]

Should be merged with http://www.mathworks.co.uk/matlabcentral/answers/110243-how-do-i-re-attach-string-columns-to-data-columns-for-identification

Answer 1

[Azzi Abdelmalek]

Your data looks like

 data={'jim01' 4.5 1.5; 'john18' 3.05 5.0 ;'jane43'  7.5 9.0 }
 scatter(cell2mat(data(:,2)), cell2mat(data(:,3)))

What do you want with the words ?