Article: Compare and Contrast

If you really want power in visualising and analysing data, DADiSP has been the big player for many years. A new release has given it some significant new capabilities. MARTIN KREBS has the details.

Struggling with spreadsheets? Perplexed by programming languages? For any engineer or researcher working with long time series, DADiSP has long represented an intriguing third way of manipulating, editing, displaying or analysing that data. Improvements to this program come along rarely, but DADiSP/2002 has arrived, and it contains some interesting developments.

DADiSP is described as an “interactive graphics worksheet”- where you can acquire, input and even generate sample data, displaying the results in multiple windows for immediate graphic comparison. A DADiSP worksheet is comprised of as many analysis windows as you need. Each window can contain either raw data, or data transformed by one of DADiSP’s many analysis functions, shown as a graph or a table. The data and graphs in each DADiSP window can be related through formulae to those in other windows, permitting you to define your own analysis chain without programming. When new data is loaded into the raw data windows, dependent analysis windows automatically recalculate and update, graphically.

The new DADiSP/2002 supports external Worksheet Documents or .DWK files (DADiSP Worksheet File). DWK files are single file, standalone worksheets that can be saved or opened by DADiSP.

The program also functions as a full ActiveX Document Server. DADiSP Worksheets can be embedded, manipulated, saved and printed by any ActiveX Container application such as MS Excel or MS Word.

DADiSP/2002 employs an optimised memory management scheme to make the most of system memory when processing large or small datasets. Large series are transparently buffered to and from the disk while in memory buffers are sized specifically to the result of the calculation at hand. The maximum buffer size can be customised to take advantage of today's large memory systems. Calculations involving smaller series are automatically compacted to conserve total memory space.

DADiSP/2002 includes over 80 new built-in and SPL routines spanning the areas of matrix and series manipulation, signal processing, maths, colour, series generation, curve fitting and statistics. It now offers over 1000 analysis routines with an intuitive and familiar user interface to provide one of the most complete and easy to use data analysis tools available today.