Converting Data to Timeseries - MATLAB - matlab

Question

I have Excel data in the following format
Ticker Date Price
GOOG 1/1/12 100
GOOG 1/2/12 200
AAPL 1/1/12 50
etc.
I would like to convert this to a time series collection (or just a matrix of data) in the following format:
Date GOOG AAPL .... (variable number of tickers)
1/1/12 100 50
As this would be easier to use in Matlab to do some calculations on it.
The way I've done this in the past, and I dont believe it is the most efficient, was to run a unique(tickers) function to check how many tickers we have, then chop off the data accordingly in a for loop. I think this is very inefficient (and ugly) for larger data sets. I was hoping someone would have a better suggestion?
Here's a sample of previous attempts I've done on similar data which assumes the data are sorted by ticker:
[uniqueSecurities, uniqueIndex] = unique(Tickers);
numberSecurities = length(uniqueSecurities);
The above code would now tell you at which location does a new ticker start (at every uniqueIndex entry).
now assuming there is the same number of observations for each ticker, you can chop off the data in this manner:
numberObservations = whatever
j = 0;
for secIndex = 1:numberSecurities
NewDataMatrix(:,secIndex) = Prices(j : j + numberObservations);
j = j + numbrtObservations;
end
Now if you have a variable number of observations for each security, instead of jumping by "numberObservations" intervals, you use the uniqueIndex I defined above, and, in a similar manner, chop everything with the indices between uniqueIndex(k) and uniqueIndex(k+1).
The reason I'm posting is because I dont believe I am being very efficient, and in addition is there some default MATLAB way to doing this? As I understand, most databases will give me data in the above format (not the best of formats!) and I dont have any control over the format unfortunately.