Any recomendations for inexpensive graphing software

While it's hardly simple to use (one person I recommended it to came back and reported "It's as user friendly as a chain saw") Scilab will graph nearly anything. And it's a complete math package.

Excel supports 3 axis graphs, what spreadsheet program are you using?

I'm trying to play with the spreadsheet program, and it seems that it does not support 3 axis graphs. X,Y,Z. nerts

Anyone know of a simple to use graphing program?

tschus pyotr

-- pyotr filipivich. Discussing the decline in the US's tech edge, James Niccol once wrote "It used to be that the USA was pretty good at producing stuff teenaged boys could lose a finger or two playing with."

Well ... you ask for "inexpensive" in the "Subject: " header and "simple to use" in the body.

Pick one!

A very good, and very powerful graphing program is called "Gnuplot", and it is even compiled for Windows, as well as for my favorite unix.

It is *free* for the download.

But it will take some work to learn to use. It can either plot from tables of data, or can plot very complex functions from formulas, but it will take some learning.

Here is the main URL:

And here is a download for Windows:

You can either do your calculations in GNUplot, or do them in the spreadsheet, and generate the tables to plot from.

Enjoy, DoN.

564

"Bill Noble" on Fri, 22 Oct 2010 13:52:29

-0700 typed in rec.crafts.metalworking the following:

Open Office - calc.

Oh - like UNIX. "User Friendly, but very picky about who it considers a friend."

Um ... fast?

thanks.

" snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com" on Sat, 23 Oct 2010

02:42:01 -0700 (PDT) typed >> >>

That's what I have, and it seems to not do three axis - at least when I feed it three columns of data X, Y, Z - it give me two lines

:-)

after a quick one day messing with SciLab, I believe you are in error. It's not hardly simply, it is fairly complex. Of the "Oh Thit

- I recognize that ... it looks like C, I think ..." sort. I used to know this stuff ... 'know of this stuff' would be more accurate.

OTOH, this looks like it could be "fun". For some values of "fun". MWahahaahahahaha. Ha!

Thanks for the pointer - now if I can just figure out how to get it to read a table of numbers and plot the pretty graph.

Did you also look at gnuplot which I mentioned earlier? I did warn that it was not simple -- but was free, and *very* powerful. :-)

And I *know* that I can get gnuplot to plot from a table of numbers. Here is an example which I regularly use (in the form of a script in unix format):

It plots to files -- because I use a wrapper makefile to then either display on the screen using ghostcript, or send it to a color laser printer for hardcopy.

====================================================================== #! /opt/sfw/bin/gnuplot set style data lines set grid set xtic 7 set terminal postscript landscape monochrome "Times-Roman" 12 set output "PLOTS/Weight.ps" set title "DoN -- Weight" plot "BP" using (($2-1)*31+$3+($4/2400)):8 # set terminal postscript landscape color "Times-Roman" 12 set title "DoN -- BP -- Sys/Dys/Pulse" set output "PLOTS/BP-all.ps" set yrange [40:150] plot \ "BP" using (($2-1)*31+$3+($4/2400)):6 t "dys",\ "BP" using (($2-1)*31+$3+($4/2400)):5 t "sys",\ "BP" using (($2-1)*31+$3+($4/2400)):7 t "pulse" ======================================================================

This is for plotting weight and blood pressure stats.

The first line tells it where to find gnuplot on my system.

The second what kind of plots (3d plots are more complex).

The third -- that I want a grid

The forth -- I want a tic on the x axis every seven days (weekly)

The fifth -- I want a B&W plot (single line on this one, so no need for colors.

The sixth -- the name of the postscript file to contain the plot (in a subdirctory)

The seventh -- a title header for the plot

The eighth -- actually make the plot -- using multiple fields to calculate a days plus decimal fraction from the various columns, and plot it against the eighth field.

A blank comment line -- skip.

Asking for color this time -- because it is multiple plots on one graph.

Again a title

and a file for the output

This time -- setting a Y range to handle the worst-case range of blood pressures and pulse rate.

Now -- three lines for a single graph -- ending the lines with '' says to continue to the next line for more. Plotting columns 6, 5, and 7 (in that order) against the calculated day and fraction. (You could simply have a single column for the X axis, but this allows me to handle multiple readings in the same day if I want to. The File which it is reading from looks like this -- including the commented-out header which I put once a month to remind myself which column is which -- but with the commenting, the gnuplot program ignores it.

#================================================== #YR Mo Da HrMn BPS BD PL Weight #==================================================

2010 05 01 2108 119 62 63 214.0

For the 3-D graphs, and a bunch of other capabilities, run the demo package. it will spend a good part of an hour (depending on the speed of the computer and how long you look at each) dazzling you with what it can do. (It starts out simple.)

You can look at the demo programs for clues as to how things were done. A lot were done from formulas, and others (including a spherical graph of the world) from data files.

Enjoy, DoN.

That there is the first problem I'm having with gnuplot - getting it into a working unit under windows. I've let all the computer nerd stuff I use to have slide, so I'm now with a very "vanilla" system. (Whine, whine, whine) Okay sniveling aside. I downloaded gnuplot-4.3.0-2009-07-08.tar.gz and opened it up into its very own subdirectory - "Gnuplot" But I find nothing which I recognize as an application. Okay, buildvms.com and make_vms.com - but while I recognize them ("Well, looky thar, hits a program!" "Yep, and it looks like what you'd use on makefiles." Dang, I knew I should have spent more time paying attention to the teacher and not the pretty girls [We-uns had Girls in our comsci program!]") Where the heck was I? Besides babbling.

Okay, I'm going to take a look at your code, and see if I can dredge up anything out of my memory, and see if I can figure out where I'm getting lost. And then I'll get back to you ... or someone.

:...

gnuplot-4.3.0-2009-07-08.tar.gz probably is source files that need to be compiled to create runnable programs. Instead of trying to do that, go to and click on the gp442win32.zip link, to get binary files already compiled specifically for MS Windows. When you unzip the file, a lot of .dll and .exe files will appear in the binary/ subdirectory. Read the file README.Windows for binary Installation directions. (File INSTALL, which tells how to compile from sources, has an MS Windows section about halfway thru, but installing binaries is simpler than compiling sources.)

[ ... ]

O.K. That is a source code package for unix (mostly). Was it you -- or someone else in this thread -- who said that they had linux available? I lose track over time.

Looking at the copy I have in a source tree, the instructions are in the plain text file "INSTALL" -- with a section for Windows including instructions for several C compilers for Windows. Presumably,

4.3.0 has even more. (The one which I am currently running is "4.2 patchlevel 4" on Sun's Solaris 10 OS.) That one came pre-compiled, but I've compiled it for quite a few systems over the years.

However -- if you don't have C compilers (Windows doesn't come with it, so unless you have added a compiler, you don't) you might want to look at a pre-compiled binary.

I did a google search for "GNUPLOT binaries windows" and found (among other things):

====================================================================== Official version of gnuplot Gnuplot version 4.1 ? current development series. Binaries for OS/2 and Windows are avaible from here:

- Cached - Similar ======================================================================

So that particular one is in Czechoslovakia bsed on the ".cz" domain name. But following it I find:

which offers several versions pre-compiled -- 422 through 43 (presumably

4.2.2 through 4.3.0.

It looks as though the ones you will want end in "-winbin.zip", and you probably want the most recent "gp43-Nov21_2008-winbin.zip". I don't know whether this is just the binary compiled for Windows, or is also the demo scripts and all. If not, you can get those from the tarfile which you already got.

BTW Unless you have installed cygwin with X11 into your system, you probably don't want any which end in "-winbinX11.zip", as they won't display on your system.

But didn't you say in an earlier article that you had linux? If you have that, there is probably a pre-compiled version just waiting to be downloaded from the particular distribution ("distro") of linux.

VMS has a different meaning for ".com" -- it is a "command" file, like the old MS-DOS ".BAT" files, except with more features. Those won't do anything for you.

You had "comsci" programs? With girls! Such luxury. I was long out of school, and had to learn all this stuff myself. (Granted, girls would have probably made it more difficult to focus on the learning. :-)

If you were using a unix system (linux counts) you would use the "configure" script first (by typing "./configure" to build a correct makefile for your version, then type "make", and if that completes without errors, then type "make install". You could optionally run the demo program -- look at the "How to test gnuplot" down a ways into the "INSTALL" file.

Then (once it is compiled and installed in a unix/linux system) you will have to correct the first line in my script which starts with "#!" so what follows is the actual path to wherever your "make install" put it -- likely "/usr/local/bin/gnuplot".

Of course, the script which I supplied assumes the presence of the BP file, with a bit more data than I supplied. But you really want to modify it for your files. (Or spend some time guessing at variations in weight, systolic and diastolic blood pressure, and pulse rate, and then plot your guesses.) Needless to say the script which I provided should be in the directory where the data file is, and you need to make the target directories first so there is somewhere to put the postscript plot files.

Good Luck, DoN.

=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D= =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D

=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D= =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D

Don't NEED the spare box, just run linux(or whatever) in a virtual box. MS' free Virtual PC kind of sucks, so see

Allows USB access, can share a folder with the host machine(handy for passing stuff in and out), just works better. Don't let that stop you from getting another box running, though. This is cheap(as in free), can boot from an iso disk image( no physical CDs), took me about a half hour to get it installed and running a variety of distros. Only limited by available memory and disk. Can go the other way, too, MS under linux. I use it a lot for testing customized boot DVDs. If you backup the virtual machine image file, a screwup is as easy to fix as copying the backup copy over the original. If you get a cheap 1T drive, you can have as many backups as you want.

Stan

"DoN. Nichols" on 28 Oct 2010 02:41:25 GMT typed in rec.crafts.metalworking the following:

LOL.

The "girls" were more mature, shall we say. Fem-Geeks, they do exist. And one of the stories was of one of the younger instructors turning from the white board, where he'd been explaining intricacies of C, and realized that half the women had been staring at his butt. (My SO at the time said "What? he has a cute butt!")

James W had pointed that out. I'll keep the gnu files "for later". Will give me an excuse to mess with Linux. Hmmm, I have a spare box ... I mean seriously, I was given two complete functional computer, and two extra monitors ... not all I need to do is wander past the thrift store for keyboards and mice...

snipped-for-privacy@prolynx.com on Wed, 27 Oct 2010 23:35:15 -0700 (PDT) typed in rec.crafts.metalworking the following:

I may not need a spare box, I just have them. With lots of room on the hard drives, too. That way, no fears about totally grapping things.