| Title: | Mathematics at DEC |
| Moderator: | RUSURE::EDP |
| Created: | Mon Feb 03 1986 |
| Last Modified: | Fri Jun 06 1997 |
| Last Successful Update: | Fri Jun 06 1997 |
| Number of topics: | 2083 |
| Total number of notes: | 14613 |
Hi, I'm investigating various plotting/data analysis programs for use in our group. Ideally, the software should be able to do the following: - MS-Windows based - Curve fits of data (polynomial, power, exponential) - Fairly easy to use by "non computer jocks" - Import ASCII or 123 or EXCEL files - Output plots in postscript format - scripting/macro language (for more "automated" plotting of data files) - be able to manipulate large data files (~5000 lines of data) Right now, on the list of candidates (which may or may not fit all of the above criteria) are: - Axum from TriMetrix - Easy Plot from Spiral Software - Matlab from Mathworks - Mathmatica from Wolfram Research - SigmaPlot - Mathcad Are there other commercially available software that I should be considering? Is there any PD/Freeware/Shareware software out there that does what I'm looking to do? Have any of you used any of the above pieces of software? Any comments? Complaints? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Regards, Steve Owen
| T.R | Title | User | Personal Name | Date | Lines |
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| 1819.1 | RUSURE::EDP | Always mount a scratch monkey. | Tue Dec 07 1993 13:22 | 32 | |
Re .0:
You could actually do most of that in 1-2-3, except that it won't graph
formulae, so you'd have to create a list of points for it to graph.
1-2-3's Data Regression command will compute a linear regression, thus
fitting points to the line ax+b. But if you have an exponential
formula, y=b*x^a, you can take the log of both sides: log y = log b +
a * log x. By taking the log of your original data (x and y) and uses
1-2-3's Data Regression, you will get a and log b. You can use those
with Data Table to create a list of points to plot.
Postscript output is obtained by printing the graph to a Postscript
printer connected (in the Windows printer control panel) to a file.
1-2-3 is available for Windows, does curve fits as explained above, is
reasonably easy to use, imports 1-2-3 files, outputs in Postscript, has
a macro language, and is able to manipulate large data files.
Of the others, I would recommend against Mathematica, both because it
is designed for heavy-duty symbolic mathematics and because it is buggy
and crashes. The only other one I am familiar with is MathCAD, which
would certainly do the analysis and plotting, but I'm not familiar with
its importing of data.
-- edp
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| 1819.2 | GOOROO::DCLARK | this is no social crisis | Mon Dec 13 1993 16:29 | 4 | |
SAS offers a lot of the functionality you're looking for. Lots
of sites have SAS licenses around here.
- Dave
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