title: Loading FRED quarterly data in Matlab/Octave
body: <p>I am trying to load quarterly data from the US Federal Reserve, Economic Data (FRED) into Matlab (actually Octave, but that shouldn't make a difference right?).</p>
  
  <p>The problem is that the FRED lists quarterly dates in a different way, e.g. 2013 Q2 is: 2013-04-01</p>
  
  <p>When I download the data (Excel only) and convert to .csv, and then load this, the minuses are interpreter as new colums. So that I end up with a year, -month, and -1 column.</p>
  
  <p>What is a good way to convert this to quarters for Matlab/Octave?</p>