Matlab Tutorial for Beginners

Written by: Zixu Zhu

A very convience tool of matlab 7.0 for graphing

If you don’t like coding and still want to see the behavior of a function or two functions, the easiest way to do that in MatLab 7.0 is using the “funtool” function. First, type “funtool” in the Command Window like this:

Then, 3 windows(Figures) will show up:

1.Figure 1:
It is the graph of function f which will be defined in Figure 3.

2.Figure2:
It is the graph of function g which will also be defined in Figure 3.

3.Figure3:

a.Function input windows:
“f=”: type in the expression of f function with variable x, the default expression is “x”
Example for f=x^2:

“g=”: same as f function, type in the expression of g function , the default expression is “1”
Example for g=sin(x):

b.Range of x window(“x=”):
Input the range of x in “x=” window, the format is “[starting value, ending value]”
For Example, if we want x from -3pi to 3pi:

c.“a=” window:
This is window is to set the value of “a” which is a factor of f. It may shift, shrink or enlarge the function f. The default value is ½.

d.operation panel
As you see, you can do almost all the common opertions between these two functions or just one function itself. The result plot will show up in Figure 2 or Figure 3.