Wouldn’t life be better with Microsoft Excel. I’ve got a large set of data (when my current calculations finish, it will be about 800,000 data point). Excel, of course, can’t handle this. It dies at ~65k rows (216). Despite the fact that many of these rows contain the value 0, the fact excel won’t even open my CSV file is really annoying. For reference I’m using Office 2000 on my desktop and Excel 2004 on my Mac.
But it doesn’t matter. Because the graphics in Excel are absolutely horrible. My data would be best visualized as a simple 3D histogram. One set of values on one axis (0-200 or so), one on the other (0-400 or so), and then the height of each bar would correspond to the value. Excel, you see, can’t do this. To do it, you have to put in things as series of data. That means I would have to define all 200 or so series of data and THEN it could graph it. A surface plot just won’t cut it, because it’s not precise looking enough. The only graph I was able to get was the bubble graph. Now bubble graphs look nice, but they don’t work for what I”m after due to matters of relative sizes of the bubbles. Also, note, you don’t have any real control over the bubble size.
I can’t even do basically a bitmap graph, which would also work. My data could easily be represented by a heat-map. That’s not a an option. Is 2003 better at any of this? Who knows. I don’t have it, I’m not buying it. I’ll look into GNU plot.
Stupid excel. There are more kinds of graphs than just 2D things.
