I know that this doesn't exacly answer your question and that its gonna sound like a case of "Tomayto, Tomahto"
But I think your table design is backwords.
When designing a data table, the convention is that columns represent the properties or fields of your data, and each datum or record is represented by a row in the table. This is especially relevant for tabular databases, but also applies to Matlab tables (and excel in my oppinion, simply because vertical scrolling is by far more convenient than horizontal scrolling).
Notice that tables have proeprties to access columns, to conveniently access specific fields of your entire dataset. For instance, if you design your table with columns for each property, you can for instance calculate the mean heat release as follows:
meanHeatRelease = mean(table1.HeatRelease);
So how would you represent your case/repeat?
Simple, add another column for case number, and another one for repeat number. That way, each record is uniquely identified by the case/repeat pair (in databases this is called a primary key)
n_testcase = 12;
n_repeats = 3;
% generate random dataset
heat = rand(n_repeats*n_testcase, 1);
onset = rand(n_repeats*n_testcase, 1);
peak = rand(n_repeats*n_testcase, 1);
% generate testcase identifiers
% this is duplicated by the number of repeats.
testCaseId = (1:n_testcase)';
testCaseIdForTab = repelem(testCaseId, n_repeats, 1);
% generate repeat identifiers per testcase
repId = repmat((1:n_repeats)', n_testcase, 1);
% now generate the table
t = table(testCaseIdForTab, repId, onset, peak, heat, ...
'VariableNames', {'TestCase', 'Repeat', 'Onset', 'Peak', 'HeatRelease'});
%
% How to use the table:
%
clf(gcf());
subplot(1, 2, 1);
% Histogram of the full onset data set
hist(t.Onset);
ylabel('Frequency');
xlabel('Onset (\circC)');
% bar chart of heat release averaged for each test case separately
subplot(1, 2, 2);
meanHeatReleasePerTestCase = mean(reshape(t.HeatRelease, n_repeats, n_testcase), 1);
bar(testCaseId, meanHeatReleasePerTestCase(:));
ylabel('Heat Release (J/g)');
xlabel('Test Case #');
% calculate the mean heat release of testcase 2:
testcase2HeatRelease = t{t.TestCase == 2, 'HeatRelease'};
testcase2HeatReleaseAvg = mean(testcase2HeatRelease)
testcase2HeatReleaseStd = std(testcase2HeatRelease)
% get repeats 2 & 3 of testcases 4 & 5
values = t(ismember(t.TestCase, [4, 5]) & ismember(t.Repeat, [2, 3]), :)
