A call to Matlab

Is there anyone here who uses Matlab on any sort of a regular basis? I've been trying to get a program to load data from a mixed set of data types but I can't get it to ignore certain data columns containing dates (1/18/07 for example) and times. The files are also reasonably large, if it doesn't selectly import then the matrix would be 10x1500 or so for each file.

Excel or Access can do that.

Yeah, but I've been asked to make the program for a different section of our department, plus it's going to have a high throughput (25-75 files per session) so I want to keep it as streamlined as possible. I know you can do this in Matlab alone, it's just been 18months since my classes on this and the memories have faded with time:dunce: