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Every day, thousands of people ask questions on MATLAB Answers and many of these are about their code. Questions such as “How can I make this faster?”, “Why do I get this error message?” or “Why don’t I get the answer I expect?”. There’s often one crucial thing missing though – the code in question!

Most of the people who answer questions on MATLAB Answers are volunteers from the community. They are answering your questions for fun, to learn more about MATLAB or just because they like to be helpful. This is even true for people such as me who are MathWorks members of staff. It’s not part of my role to patrol the community, looking where I can help out. I do it because I like to do it.

Make it easier to help me help you.

Imagine you’re a volunteer, looking for something interesting to answer. What kind of questions are you more likely to dig into and help an anonymous stranger figure out?

In my case, I almost always focus on problems that I can easily reproduce. I rarely know the answer to any question off the top of my head and so what I like to do is start off with the problem you are facing and use the various tools available to me such as the profiler or debugger to figure it out. This is the fun of it all for me – I almost always learn something by doing this and you get helped out as a side effect!

The easier I can reproduce your issue, the more likely I am to get started. If I can’t reproduce anything and the answer isn’t immediately obvious to me I’ll just move onto the next question. One example that demonstrates this perfectly is a case where someone’s MATLAB code was running too slowly. All of the code was available so I could run it on my machine, profile it and provide a speed-up of almost 150x.

It's not always feasible or desirable to post all of your code in which case you need to come up with a minimal, reproducible example. What’s the smallest amount of code and data you can post that I can run on my machine and see what you see? This may be more work for you but it will greatly increase your chances of receiving an answer to your question.

VOTE on your favorite MATLAB images before Oct. 31 and win special edition T-shirts!

In just 2 weeks, 11,000 votes have been cast on 1200+ entries ! In the final week (Oct 25~Oct 31, 2021), we will add some fun and give out a T-shirt to lucky voters who cast:

• The 12000th vote
• The 12500th vote
• The 13000th vote
• The 13500th vote
• The 14000th vote
• The 14500th vote
• The 15000th vote
• The 15500th vote
• The 16000th vote

Furthermore, for every vote an entry gets, MathWorks will donate $1 to Direct Relief (Maximum amount of $20 donated per entry; maximum of $20,000 in total).

Look at the entries , and if they make you smile, VOTE!

Categorical navigation is now available in MATLAB Answers.

• Categories empower you to find, watch, and answer questions by topic and product, rather than product alone.
• Individual answers have been categorized using an AI model written by MathWorks developers. Read more about our method here.

FAQ

1. What if I've bookmarked or subscribed to a product?

The links will continue to work but use a different filter mechanism.  We encourage you to try the new category filter, to find more questions in your topic of interest.

2. Can I still select a product on the question?

Yes - and product and tags are factored into the text analytics algorithm.  Correcting those fields should improve the nightly categorization. 

Categories are also shown in the Help Center.

Check out your favorite topic of interest and let us know how we're doing in the comments below!

What amazing images can be created with no more than 280 characters of MATLAB code? Check out the GALLERY of 700+ entries from the MATLAB Mini Hack contest.

VOTE on your favorite images and help fight the global pandemic! For every vote an entry gets, MathWorks will donate $1 to Direct Relief *.

How can I vote?

1) You need to log in with your MathWorks Account. If you do not have a MathWorks Account, you can create one at MathWorks sign in .

2) You can vote for an entry by clicking on the heart icon on an entry card or the vote button on the entry detail page.

*Maximum amount of $20 donated per entry; maximum of $20,000 donated based on the combined totals raised from the Treasure Hunt contest and the MATLAB Mini Hack contest.