Any easy way to read all the columns in Matlab?

my format is

date time y1 y2 y3 y4 .........................
4/27/2010 00:3:09 34 45 45 56 ................

so on currently i am reading these with the code

[c,pathc]=uigetfile({'*.txt'},'Select the data','C:\Data');

file=[pathc c];
data= dlmread(file, ',', 1,3);

so needless to say i am skipping the time stamps.

Was wondering if there is aeasy way to read the time stamps and plot my other colums agianst the time in hours.

my files are 43200 X 30 and some are 86400 X 90

Related question : is the format same for .csv and .xls files , i mean except ofcourse xlsread