Modifying Excel Column Names to Legal Variables in MATLAB

(Originally posted on Doug's MATLAB Video Tutorials blog.)

I have been using MATLAB tables lately. In doing that, MATLAB will store meta data with your numeric data. I was bringing data in from Excel files. Each column name will eventually become a variable name. If these column names include characters like '(' then they can not be MATLAB variable names. Rather than modify the Excel files, I just modified the column names before making the table in MATLAB.