I had forgotten...

[baratron]

...that Micro$oft Excel can only plot up to approximately 32000 data points. It has been more than 5 years since I had to plot large files. But it is rather important to show an absolute plot of the data as the very first result of my thesis, and most of my stations have somewhere in the region of 60000 data points. Faced with the choice between IDL or... IDL, I started looking for alternatives. The one that was recommended to me before was Kaleidagraph, which is a native Mac program also ported to Windows, but the copy I have is (a) of dubious origin (b) sitting on my mum's old Windows 3.1 machine, and thus at least 6 years out of date. I thought, now I actually have (a small amount of) money, if I'm going to use software I should buy it legitimately, but the official Kaleidagraph website was entirely lacking in prices, saying "We'll update this on Monday", and prices from other online sites varied from US$179.99 to £170.38. Ack!

I thought I was going to have to do battle with the IDL-monster after all, but Richard reminded me of the existence of Gnuplot, which appears to do what I need. And thus Richard remains my best friend in the whole world ever :)

Comments

[hoopycat.livejournal.com]

I am somewhat dismayed at the frequency in which I hit that limit in Excel, especially since I'm not a researcher, I'm a business-person.

I still think that limit is completely bone-headed, but the best thing for competition ever. It's going to get me to look at something other than Microsoft Excel to do call stats in a couple of months ;-) -rt