What's the best way to format time dependent data to be accessed later

I have a bunch of vectors that are all time based (also a vector). I want to consolidate them into one data set, so I don't have to pass them all individually. I want to be able to access them by a string name, like data.time or data.Xforce or data.velocity, but I also want to prepare the data for a .mat file, that can be output to a text file with column headers that are strings describing each column. I also wish to minimize/not do any hard coding where I have to know the number of column I need to insert the 'name' of the corresponding data. I'm not familiar with what the timeseries class can do, but if someone has a couple of pointers (about timeseries or the best way to accomplish this I would greatly appreciate it.