Check the attributes section of http://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/validateattributes.html and look at
'vector' Row or column vector, or a scalar value
With just this attribute, you can replace the three in your function call and evaluate the way you want
offsetchange = 43;
validateattributes( offsetchange, {'numeric'}, {'vector','nonempty'})
offsetchange = [1 2 3];
validateattributes( offsetchange, {'numeric'}, {'vector','nonempty'})
offsetchange = [1 2 3 4 5 6]';
validateattributes( offsetchange, {'numeric'}, {'vector','nonempty'})
offsetchange = [1 2 3; 4 5 6];
validateattributes( offsetchange, {'numeric'}, {'vector','nonempty'})
Expected input to be a vector.
Only the last fails, as expected.
