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Origin 6.0 Software Review
| Title: |
Origin 6.0 |
| Made by: |
Microcal Software, Inc. |
| Platform: |
Windows 95/98/NT |
| Category: |
Scientific data display and analysis |
| Price: |
Free demo; $595 registered version |
| Screen Shots |
Origin 6.0 Screen Examples |
| Ordering Info: |
Click here to order
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| Description: |
Scientific Data analysis and Graphics.
Intuitive and versatile - these are the two platinum qualities of Origin 6.0 - data analysis and presentation software made by Microcal Software, Inc. My experience with Origin comes from using the product on a daily basis for my research work in the field of nonlinear and fiber optics. I quickly realized that the two most important qualities that make Origin distinct from the other data analysis and presentation software are it's beautifully intuitive interface and it's mighty versatility.
Origin 6.0 provides ease-of-use, power, and speed for technical graphics and data analysis in Windows. You can easily import data or open Excel workbooks directly. 2D and 3D graphs are created quickly and effortlessly with just a single click. Graph elements can be modified by double clicking to get a specialized dialog box. Prominent analysis features include descriptive statistics, differentiation, integration, filtering, FFT, linear and nonlinear curve fitting, and peak finding. Final graphs can be exported as EPS, AI, JPEG, and many other common types.
Origin 6.0 is intuitive.
Guess what? You will not need the manual to use this software! Origin features a wonderfully simple layout screen.
Anything that you wish to add, delete or change on your plot - just place your mouse pointer on that object and right click. A useful context-sensitive menu will appear and you can select the function you want to perform. For example, to add a column in a worksheet, just right click on the worksheet, and choose Add Column, or to perform statistics, choose either Statistics on Columns, or Statistics on Rows.
To make detailed changes, you simply double click on an object to bring up a specialized dialog box. For example, you can double click on any of the axis objects and modify any of it's properties. A truly great feature is that, if you wish, you can modify the properties of the whole object from the same interactive window. Sample of this is shown in the figure below.
Another time saving feature of Origin is an extensive and intuitive set of button tool bars. You can perform almost any operation by just clicking on one of the buttons. A useful button function description pops out when you place your mouse on top of any of the buttons - taking out the guessing game.
Origin 6.0 is versatile.
If you need to analyze your data and/or prepare it for publications and/or presentations, then you have surely gone through the pains of using several software packages: one for the analysis, one for plotting your graphs and charts and maybe one for the final layout. Well, Origin can replace all of these! With Origin, input is your raw data, output is a publication quality report - ready for print. Here is the partial list of what you can do with Origin on a path from data to publication:
Worksheet:
- You can import almost any data type that you can imagine, from ASCII, dBASE, Excel, Lotus, to vectors and matrices from Mathematica.
- Size of the data sets is not limited.
- You can export your data, again, into any data type that you can imagine.
Data Analysis:
- Fit your data to over 200 built in fitting functions, or you can use your custom defined fit. Polynomial, Multiple, Linear and Non-linar fitting is possible. The interface to the fit function is very versatile and interactive. (Shown below)
- Perform Correlation, Convolution, Fast Fourier Transform filtering on your data.
- Extensive statistical reports (sum, min, max, histograms, mean, SD, T-test, ANOVA, variance-covariance and more)
- You can even perform integration and differentiation on your data.
- Peak searching, smoothing, averaging and filtering of your data sets is easy and powerful.
Graphics:
- With Origin you can plot your data on any graph type that you can imagine: line, scatter, area, bar, pie, vector, polar, waterfall, double Y axis and more.
- 3D plots: scatter, trajectory, bar, surface, wire frame, contour and more ...
- Add error bars in both X and Y directions with ease
- Have multiple axis on your plots. You can place plots on layers. You can even link a given axis from different layers with an arbitrary formula.
- Add Greek letters and mathematical font characters to your plots.
- Layout text around or on your plots to create a professional publication and/or presentation report.
Origin 6.0 also has a built in scripting language (C-like expressions and flow control) using which you can create custom analysis scripts and macros.
All features of Origin 6.0 are fully customizable.
Project Explorer:
A new Project Explorer feature makes it possible to set up an Origin project to warehouse your experimental data and analysis. The project can hold all the data and graphics from a series of experiments neatly in a series of hierarchical folders. The Project Explorer lets you organize your work into well-defined folders within the project. This makes it possible to organize work far more efficiently than other tools.
Plot Details Dialog Box:
A plot details dialog box makes it possible to edit aspects of the graph from a single location. It provides the ability to edit any dataplot attribute including data points, error bars, data labels, functions, layers, or the graph page - all in one interactive dialog box. Based on the graphic element that is selected, customization options are dynamically displayed.
Unique method of working with data:
Origin provides a unique method of interacting with your data and the analysis interface. The program's extensive set of data analysis tools float over the workspace so that the user can interactively explore their data set. You set the data analysis parameters and click a single button to perform the analysis. Graphical results are immediately displayed and the result parameters are recorded in a results log window. A new mask toolbar makes it easy to hide points that you want to ignore (i.e., such as outliers) or investigate your data in segments. Once they are masked out, any type of data analysis that is performed will disregard those points.
Custom color mapping:
A new custom color palette makes it possible to map data onto colors to create striking 2D, 3D, contour and surface plots. To highlight trends within a single data plot, you can map Y dataset values in your data plot to colors from a selected palette. For example, you could create a plot that displays increasing temperature by varying the saturation of red. Most interestingly, this feature can be used to visually represent another dimension of data on an individual data plot, a series of plots and for contour and surface graphs.
In conclusion:
 As you may infer from our review of Origin 6.0, we consider it to be one of the very best data analysis and scientific display software packages available for Windows based operating systems. However, you should not take our word for it - try it yourself: click here to download a FREE demo.
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