Please Recommend a Proper Charting Software

[dima777]

Hello Friends!

 

I am somewhat new to scientific charting) more accustomed to working in Excel, but I think I have run into its limitation as regards to charting…I am not sure if it can do the following…

 

I wanted to ask if there is charting software that can do these tasks:

 

1) Take the time series data from excel, each data series will have two describers – COLOUR and THICKNESS

2) plots each time series data in such a way as:

a) colors the time series according to a time series criterion (eg. 1 for red, 2 for black)

b) allows to adjust the thinness of the plotted series based on another criterion (e.g. 10 very thick, 2- close to hairline)

 

Thanks for your time!).

I will be glad to hear any onion.

 

Dima

[ecoli]

I recommend a command line program (such as R or S) to increase your computational power. However, if you just want a graphing feature that beats excel, I've used Prism and thought it was a step up (it's not free)

[dima777]

thank you for your reply) do you think you can adjust trendline width in Prism based on condition?

[Schrödinger's hat]

thank you for your reply) do you think you can adjust trendline width in Prism based on condition?

 

I haven't used prism, but this would be more the type of thing I'd use something command line based for. Such as the already suggested R (its plots look fairly basic at first glance, but they have many advanced features once you dig).

Octave also has a number of plotting libraries available in which it wouldn't be too hard to code something like that (if it wasn't already built in -- I've certainly done graphs with differend line widths and graphs with color as a parameter before).

Sage can probably do such things, too. Although both Sage and Octave are more aimed at being general purpose computation/maths environments than displaying data.

Tools like these can be a bit scary if you haven't had any experience with command line or programming before, but they are extremely useful once you get into them.

[Klaynos]

My collegues and I use one (or a variation) of the following,

 

R (Cross platform, very very powerful, and free)

Igor (Windows, but runs in wine. Very powerful but not cheap)

Origin (Windows. Similar user experience to Excell)

Datagraph (Mac and really very good I'm told)

 

I personally would choose to use R.

[dima777]

wow thanks for all the suggestions!))) I am rather removed from the programming itself!)) I have heard of R - it must be pretty strong...Can you please recommend a place whee I can ask R developers further about this question?

Thanks!

[Hal.]

Just Google ' R ' and you are on the way . I'll suggest Scilab .