This simple plotting program is merely intended to make preparing reasonably good plots for beginning scientists as easy as possible. While it does print high resolution plots and allows high resolution plots to be copied to both Macintosh and Windows clipboards, it is not intended as a replacement for high end scientific plotting programs or even the charting capabilities of ubiquitous spreadsheet programs. The focus is on getting a plot that will allow the superior visual analysis capabilities of the human mind to be brought to bear on numerical data.
The program actually began life on an original Macintosh computer purchased in 1984 along with the Microsoft BASIC compiler (anybody remember that one?) that became available for the Mac. It was originally intended just for my personal use in preparing graphs for general chemistry lecture presentations. A few colleagues saw it and said they would use in their classes if I would just convert in to the IBM compatible systems available in small numbers in our department. So I learned Borland C++ and converted it to the IBM. It could send bitmap images to dot matrix printers and high resolution plots to an HP plotter. This is where it remained until a BASIC object oriented compiler called RealBASIC became available. It could cross compile the same code to both Macintosh and Windows platforms. So the old C++ code was painfully converted back into BASIC once again. It has suffered through several 'improvements' to the form you now see on this web page.
Well.... it can make plots of X,Y data. It tries to set up the X and Y axies with appropriate scaling to give decent looking plots and will accept up to 1024 hand entered X,Y pairs. You can also copy and paste tab delimited data pairs from a spreadsheet program, such as Excel, and you can copy the data back. There are menus to let you perform simple calculations on the data set (first and second derivative, log Y, Ln Y, 1/Y) and select different symbols for the data points (points, circles, squares and triangles). There is also a simple linear least squares fit that will display the slope and intercept as well as a curve fit algorithm that force fits three points at time. You can open up to ten plot windows at once (no windows menu at the moment), but no multiple series on a plot. Try a Google search for scientific plotting programs if you need more bells and whistles.
Anybody with a computer running Windows 2000, XP (or above, I suspect although I have tried them all - who can afford all that Microsoft OS stuff?) or Macintosh OS X 10.3 or above. I have been thinking about testing a linux version, but who would really use it? While you may use the program for any educational use, you are not allowed to make money with it. That is to say, you can not sell the binary or use it to sell products. You can easily purchase a compiler and write your own software to do that.
Download the .zip file for your system and unzip it. A directory (the name begins with a space so it usually sorts to the top of the list) will be created wherever you normally unzip such things containing the executable and some sample data files. Play around with the sample files and try entering some data of your own. If you like it, use it. If something really seems wrong, let me know (rbadger@uwsp.edu). If you want me to add something, again let me know. I might add features, if its educational effectiveness will be improved without making it even more difficult to use.
A sample plot:
Last update: Saturday, 12-May-2007 12:34:29 CDT