Table Multiplication error: Both tables must have the same variables

I am trying to figure out why these table columns will not multiply together. It is a table of one size of imaginary numbers 94x3

SAI =

94×3 table

Var1 Var2 Var3

_________ _________ _________

0-10059i 0-5021.2i 0-3338.1i

0-8800.5i 0-4390.5i 0-2916.2i

0-7821.1i 0-3899.7i 0-2587.6i

0-7037.5i 0-3506.6i 0-2324.3i

0-6396.2i 0-3184.7i 0-2108.3i

etc...

I am getting an error when doing SAI(:,1) .*SAI(:,2).

It gives the same error when using *

Error using .*

Both tables must have the same variables.

What am I doing wrong here?

Thanks for any help

[Dyuman Joshi]

Any particular reason why you are storing numeric data in a table?

Or are you importing the data via readtable? If you are, I would suggest you to import numeric data via readmatrix and perform any operations on the numeric arrays accordingly.

Multiplying the columns of a table seems un-intuitive (atleast to me)

[Scott]

That makes alot of sense of why I was getting some errors much appreciated

Answer 1

[Stephen23]

One simple solution is to use curly braces to access table content (not parentheses which return another table):

SAI{:,1} .*SAI{:,2}
%  ^   ^      ^   ^ 

How to access table content is explained in the documentation:

https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/matlab_prog/access-data-in-a-table.html

Most likely using numeric arrays would be even better, as Dyuman Joshi suggested.

"What am I doing wrong here?"

Parentheses returns a table. Your parenthesis indexing returns two tables, each of which has exactly one column/variable. But the names of those variables are different. But tables can only be operands to an operation if they have exactly the same variable names, as the documentation makes clear:

https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/matlab_prog/direct-calculations-on-tables-and-timetables.html#CalculationsOnTablesAndTimetablesWithoutExtractionExample-4

Because your two tables have different variable/column names your code throws an error.

Solution: don't try to multiply tables with different variable names.

[Scott]

Thank you!

[Dyuman Joshi]

Hello @Scott , if this answer solved your problem, please consider accepting the answer.

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