No, pretty straightforward with categorical arrays...
[~,txt]=xlsread('places.xls');
cats={'Place 1';'Place 2';'Place 3'; ...; 'Place 10'}; % define categories/order
places=categorical(txt,cats); % convert to categories
n=countcats(places); % count each category
bar(n) % bar plot the counts vs cat
set(gca,'xticklabels',cats) % label by category
NB: the names must be spelled correctly/exactly including spacing this way to produce exact matches to the defined categories in the cats array. You can use
unique(txt)
to get a list but it will be sorted alphanumerically and so won't correspond to numeric order; that's what defining the array takes care of. It's possible to write logic to deal with it, of course; above is the simplified story.
