Science students driven from

[dvince2]

Alright... forgive me, but I need to vent after my week of frustration.
My goal: create a scatter plot with propagated error bars (ie different values of error for different points).
Alas, as it turns out, this is not possible at all on a mac.

[rant]

Numbers doesn't even have Error bars, so it was useless.
So, I attempted to use Excel '08. Turns out in addition to other features removed, one can not have custom error bars. I had to boot up my old pentium 3 with Office 2003 just to do my homework.

[/rant]

I love my mac... don't get me wrong. I'm not going to sit here and say I'm moving to Vista over this. But for any university science student looking to buy a mac, this could be a deal breaker.

 

[Cromulent]

Alright... forgive me, but I need to vent after my week of frustration.
My goal: create a scatter plot with propagated error bars (ie different values of error for different points).
Alas, as it turns out, this is not possible at all on a mac.

[rant]

Numbers doesn't even have Error bars, so it was useless.
So, I attempted to use Excel '08. Turns out in addition to other features removed, one can not have custom error bars. I had to boot up my old pentium 3 with Office 2003 just to do my homework.

[/rant]

I love my mac... don't get me wrong. I'm not going to sit here and say I'm moving to Vista over this. But for any university science student looking to buy a mac, this could be a deal breaker.

I'm sure there is a motivated developer working on one somewhere. If not start talking to some computer science students and buy them some beer .

But I agree it is stupid that there is nothing with that functionality available for the Mac at the moment. I really do think that is a nice gap in the market for a third party to exploit.

 

[SteveG4Cube]

NeoOffice? Virtual PC? Crossover? Parallels/Fusion? Boot Camp? I may have to rarely resort to Windows, but I've never had to resort to using a different computer.

 

[gauchogolfer]

First of all, calm down. There are plenty of plotting/charting/graphing software packages that work on OS X.
If your plotting needs are 2D, I'd give Kaleidagraph a shot. It's a good option for most applications, and not expensive.

 

[boast]

NeoOffice?

Error bars are set for Openoffice 3

 

[Viremia]

I feel your pain. The exclusion of custom error bars came as a shock to me in Office08. I use Excel for basic and rough charting functions and the amount of mess MS has made with its charting functions have caused me to revert back to Office04.

The program I use for more advanced and polished (for publication) charts is Graphpad's Prism. It isn't cheap though. However, the computer store at your school may be able to get it at a significant discount.

 

[dvince2]

NeoOffice? Virtual PC? Crossover? Parallels/Fusion? Boot Camp? I may have to rarely resort to Windows, but I've never had to resort to using a different computer.

Havn't looked into NeoOffice.

As for the others, that would mean that I have to shell out more $$ for parallels/Virtural PC, a windows licence, and then spend the time to get it set up and working all for drawing lines on a graph.

I know there are other options, but none of them involve a reasonable amount of work, considering that all other versions of Excel has the feature to begin with.

 

[gauchogolfer]

Havn't looked into NeoOffice.

As for the others, that would mean that I have to shell out more $$ for parallels/Virtural PC, a windows licence, and then spend the time to get it set up and working all for drawing lines on a graph.

I know there are other options, but none of them involve a reasonable amount of work, considering that all other versions of Excel has the feature to begin with.

Kaleidagraph should be very inexpensive from your university, and runs natively in OS X. Why not give it a try?

 

[fuzzynavo]

Prism 5 by Graphpad is an awesome piece of software that does graphing and various statistical analyses. It's designed for the biological sciences, so if that's the field you're in you might want to give that a try. The only downside is that it's rather expensive. But you might be able to get a discount through your university?

 

[deputy_doofy]

Actually, if you have your Windows install CD from your old Pentium machine, you could install it using VirtualBox, a free virtualization program. Admittedly, I haven't used it in a while, but it has been updated for Leopard.