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July 22nd, 2008

MATLAB Basics: Adding a toolbar to a GUI

People often make their own GUIs in GUIDE and they have a data visualization. When you embed an axis in your own GUI rather than using a figure window, you lose the built in toolbar that has zoom, pan, and other goodies. You can add the widgets you want back into your GUI very easily, or even make your own custom tools for the toolbar. This short video shows you how.

Video Content

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12 Responses to “MATLAB Basics: Adding a toolbar to a GUI”

  1. Daniel Armyr replied on :

    Nicey nice. Another feature which isn’t so important you break your skull finding yourself, but allways felt that you really should find out how to do.

    –DA

  2. Sharina replied on :

    Hi Doug,

    This proves to be an excellent video.
    But can u please tell the version of MATLAB which has a toolbar edit option in it?

  3. Doug replied on :

    This video was made with 2008a.

    Doug

  4. Rachel replied on :

    Hi Doug,

    I was wondering if you could help me out?

    I have created a GUI which displays two axes. However I only want the zoom tool to be used on one of them. (I tried using zoom off, but turns the zoom tool off on both axes!) Do you know how I can achieve this?

    Thank you

    Rachel

  5. jiro replied on :

    Hi Rachel,

    Take a look at Example 3 here:

    http://www.mathworks.com/access/helpdesk/help/techdoc/ref/zoom.html

    jiro

  6. Geoff replied on :

    Sharina might like to know that toolbar editing was introduced to GUIDE in MATLAB Version 7.5 (R2007b).

  7. shakeham replied on :

    Doug, thank you very much. You posts are very useful

  8. Kaj replied on :

    Doug,

    It does not seem possible to add an ‘plot edit’ button in this way. I would like to be able to select objects plotted in the axes in my GUI. In a GUI using R14, I built a ‘plot edit’ button using the commond ‘plotedit on’, but in R2008a this does not work — it disables all my GUI buttons.

    Thanks,
    Kaj

  9. shakeham replied on :

    Hi Doug,
    Sorry this may not be the right place to ask this question. But I really find it one of the very few impossible things to do with Matlab. I’m trying to build a GUI, with a button which if clicked will open the Matlab arrayeditor and allow the user to edit some data. But as all the halting functions, like ‘pause’, ‘waitfor’ or ‘uiwait’ will take us somewhere outside the current workspace, it won’t work. There would be nothing in the arrayEditor window. I’d like some function that would hold the program right there like what we’d have with a breakpoint in debugging mode. Is it even possible? Thanks!

  10. Scott Hirsch replied on :

    Shakeham -

    You might want to try working with UITABLE instead - just wrap it in a figure. A caution - UITABLE was released in R2008A. Earlier versions (back to MATLAB 7/R14) have an undocumented version of UITABLE that works, but which is not compatible with the new version.

    - scott

  11. Surbhi replied on :

    Hey this was really useful.
    Thank you so much. Your vides are *SOO* helpful. I must have spent easily 1-2 hrs on reading things but referring to your videos speeds up everything :)
    thanks !

  12. Doug replied on :

    Surbhi,

    Glad to help. Thanks for the feedback!

    -Doug

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