Graph population data for the 20th Century taken from the 1990 US census and label x-axis ticks with 2-digit years.

Create time data by decade.

t = (1900:10:1990)';

Enter total population counts for the USA.

p = [75.995 91.972 105.711 123.203 131.669 ...
	150.697 179.323 203.212 226.505 249.633]';

Convert years to serial date numbers using the datenum function, and then create a bar graph of the data.

figure
bar(datenum(t,1,1),p)

Replace x-axis ticks with 2-digit years. The numeric identifier 11 corresponds to the predefined MATLAB® date format 'yy'.

dateFormat = 11;
datetick('x',dateFormat)

Plot traffic count data against date ticks for hours of the day showing AM and PM.

Get traffic count data.

load count.dat

Create arrays for an arbitrary date, for example, April 18, 1995.

n = length(count);
year = repmat(1995,1,n);
month = repmat(4,1,n);
day = repmat(18,1,n);

Create arrays for each of 24 hours.

hour = 1:n;
minutes = zeros(1,n);

Get the serial date numbers for the date arrays.

sdate = datenum(year,month,day,hour,minutes,minutes);

Plot a 3-D bar graph of the traffic data against the serial date numbers.

bar3(sdate,count)

Label the tick lines of the graph's y-axis with the hours of the day.

datetick('y','HHPM')

Select a starting date.

startDate = datenum('02-01-1962');

Select an ending date.

endDate = datenum('11-15-2012');

Create a variable, xdata, that corresponds to the number of years between the start and end dates.

xData = linspace(startDate,endDate,50);

Plot random data.

figure
stem(xData,rand(1,50))

Label the x-axis with 4-digit years, preserving the x-axis limits by using the 'keeplimits' option.

datetick('x','yyyy','keeplimits')

Select a starting date.

startDate = datenum('01-01-2009');

Select an ending date.

endDate = datenum('12-31-2009');

Create a variable, xdata, that corresponds to the number of months between the start and end dates.

xData = linspace(startDate,endDate,12);

Plot random data.

figure
stairs(xData,rand(1,12))

Set the number of XTicks to the number of points in xData.

ax = gca;
ax.XTick = xData;

Label the x-axis with month names, preserving the total number of ticks by using the 'keepticks' option.

datetick('x','mmm','keepticks')