How to access a table using the string from within a cell as part of the dot notation index

Hi, I have thousands of textiles that over the years have been formatted differently, for example velocity data may be in column2 in one file but in column 5 in another. I have some code that finds which column velocity is in, and then I want my script to access that column of the table, but I'm falling over with the last part where I use dot notation consisting of the table name and the columnID which I derived from the code, any ideas?

close all
clear all
clc

A={'Exp ID','drop1: Average Radius',...
'drop1 volume (pl)','trajectory','velocity (m/s)',...
'average velocity (m/s)','Comments',  'Time'};

possibleVolStr={'Volume_pl','volume_pl','drop1 volume (pl)',...
'drop1 Volume (pl)','Volume'}

VolOuty = ismember(A,possibleVolStr)
[~,VolColID] = find(VolOuty)
VolCol_header={A(VolOuty)}
VolCol_header_title=['A' num2str(VolColID)]

dataNew=cell2table(A)

Z={VolCol_header_title}
Z=convertCharsToStrings(Z)
vol=dataNew.Z

%VolColID tells us which column is the volume

The error is: >> Error using column_moving_05 (line 45) Unrecognized variable name 'Z'.

Answer 1

[Stephen23]

datanew.(Z)

https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/matlab_prog/access-data-in-a-table.html

[Stephen Devlin]

I get this when I run it steve

Error using untitled434 (line 26) Table variable names must be character vectors.

I have figured out I can do it with vol=datanew(:,VolColID) but I was puzzled as to why I couldn't do it with dot notation which is what I usually use for table indexing

[Stephen23]

Simplify your code: get rid of the convertCharsToStrings and find.