-You can make a Matlab shortcut to an initialization file called startup.m. Here, I define formatting, precision of the output, and plot parameters for my Matlab session (for example, I use a larger plot axis/font size so that .fig's can be seen plainly when I put them in presentations.) See a good blog post from one of the developers about it http://blogs.mathworks.com/loren/2009/03/03/whats-in-your-startupm/ .
-You can load an entire numerical ascii file using the "load" function. This isn't particularly fast, but gets the job done quickly for prototyping (shouldn't that be the Matlab motto?)
-As mentioned, the colon operator and vectorization are lifesavers. Screw loops.
