Golden Software, a developer of affordable software for visualizing and analyzing diverse data sets, has improved the flexibility of plotting functionality in the latest release of its scientific graphing package, Grapher.
Grapher is used extensively by scientists and engineers in oil & gas operations, environmental consulting, climate research, mineral exploration, and academic pursuits. The package offers deeper insights into diverse data sets, including chemical, physical, geologic and geospatial data, through 80 different 2D and 3D plotting types.
‘In the new version of Grapher released today, we focused on giving users a better overall experience with greater flexibility in the way they plot data and present the results,’ said Justine Carstairs, Grapher product manager.
The newest release of Grapher, which is downloadable this week to all users with active maintenance agreements, includes these enhancements:
Data Filter – With this time-saving tool, users can add multiple exclusion and inclusion filters combined with logic conditions and math functions to control which data will be plotted. This tool gives users a better ability to parse data sets, especially large ones, without manually editing their worksheets.
Auto Disperse Label Tool – Grapher automatically eliminates cluttered plots by moving data labels so they do not overlap. Previously a time-consuming manual process, this function is especially useful when resizing plots for publication or presenting clustered data.
Class Plot Reordering – With simple drag-and-drop functionality, users can now control and change the order in which text classes and their classification symbols appear in the associated Legend.
Percentage Label Option – This new function allows users to automatically convert decimal data values to percentages without making manual conversion in the spreadsheet. Plot and axes labels also change to percentage formats when this format is used.
Status Bar Update and Mouse Curser Position – Users can see the mouse cursor position in axis units in the status bar at the bottom of the screen when the user hovers the cursor over a point on the graph. Status Bar sections are now also resizable.
Align and Distribute Objects to Margin Tools – For simplified publishing, printing, and displaying of plots, these layout tools make it easy to align graphs, text, drawn objects, and shapeswith the page margins.
Improved Worksheet Manager – This enhancement reduces clutter by automatically closing data files that are not being used or linked in the project, a function especially beneficial for users who change the source data files in their plots.
Digitize in Time/Date Format – Useful for projects graphing change over time, Grapher automatically converts time values from the commonly used Julian format to the user’s preferred Date/Time format on the plot axes.
Looking ahead to 2022 with an eye toward enhanced ease of use, Golden Software’s development team is working on new features, functionality, and enhancements for the next version of Grapher. Users with active maintenance can try out these new capabilities by downloading Grapher Beta. Users are invited to send comments and/or questions directly to the Golden Software development team as they use the Beta version in their day-to-day workflows.
Grapher Beta features include:
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Multiple Axes Breaks allows users to place as many breaks in the X or Y axes as they want, primarily to eliminate long axis sections.
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Colour Gradient Transparency is now supported for 3D plots such as 3D Surface and 3D Bubble plots. Transparency can be applied based on Z values and is supported during export to your favorite image formats.
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Inverse/Reciprocal Scales, such as 1/X can now be graphed on linked axes to show inverse relationships of data sets.
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Stacked and Adjacent Options have long been available for Bar Charts in Grapher, but these options are now offered for Histograms, making it easy to display and compare histogram distributions in multiple data sets.
Details on Grapher Beta may be accessed here: What is Grapher Beta?.
