@acer thank you I was not aware of that.

@Carl Love thank you for the additonal explanation as it was very helpful. I would love to vote you up but do not know how I can do that. Could you explain?

@Carl Love thank you so much, that did the trick. Maple is a great program, but the syntax possibilities are huge. Thanks again for taking time to help me out.

@acer You were right I made a typo. Thanks again for your willingness to help

@acer thank you again for your swift and adequate help! The second works fine and is easily adaptable to check one column, with the first I seem to have some issues in obtaining the desired result. Anyway, I can proceed.

@acer thank you for your help. That was indeed what I had in mind. Do you have a solution for my second question: how to count all numeric values in the cvs file without the cells filled with "". numelems is apparently not capable in doing this. 

@acer it refused indeed to upload the cvs file. I have zipped and attached. Looking forward for your comments.LVAD_HTX_VBLACT.zip  

@acer thank you for helping me out! I certainly will have an in depth look to the help pages you mentioned. Have a nice weekend

@acer thank you for your explanation. May I just ask you one more question? Can I use the date + time to sort an array or a vector? Thank you for your time and willingness to help me out.

@acer , thank you so much for your swift reply. It seems to work for a single input but fails for multiple input (see attached file). In your example you extract each component (year, month, ..), but is it possible to have them connected so that I can sort my vector?

Thank you

Download StringToDateTime.m

@acer thank you for your swift reply and helpful comments. I think I understand now. I apologize for these sometimes very basic questions but changing from software after 25 years seems to be more difficult for me than originally anticipated.

Best regards.

@acer , thank you for your reply and the file. Unfortunately it does not completely solve my problem. The export of the measuring device does not give an extension to the exported file, so my question is mainly can I import the file without manually adding .txt? If I try to do that now, Maple states null file and refuses to import the file.

Thank you for your help!

@dharr thank you for taking time to reply. Yes you are right but at that time I had only a few files so I changed the extension manually to .txt. Unfortunately, the export of the measuring device does not give an extension to the exported file, so my question is mainly can I import the file without manually adding .txt? If I try to do that now, Maple states null file and refuses to import the file.

If you find it more suitable to ask my question in the old treat, I will try to do that in the future.

Thank you for help.

@rlopez thank you for your help and clarifications. I have been able to solve, with the help of some power user, now my problem. Thank you for your continuous support to this forum.

@acer I know Maple is extremely powerful so I would like to ask you whether there are other methods than the one you showed, to achieve the same result? Thanks again for your help.