Data Browser Export View

This view allows export of samples from the current plot to files for further analysis in for example Excel or Open Office. You can open it via the context menu of the plot window.

Finally, the "Export" button starts the actual export.

Using the Exported Data in MS Excel

The exported data files are in a text format with TAB-delimited columns suitable for import into spreadsheet programs like Microsoft Excel. Assume you chose a filename of "test.dat" on your Desktop, follow these steps for import into Excel:
  1. In Excel, use File/Open to open the file "test.dat".
    You might have to select "Files of type: All Files (*.*)" in the file "Open" dialog to do this.
  2. A "Text Import Wizard" should appear, and the default settings should already be set to
  3. Excel will default to a less useful format for the first column, the "Time" column, and only show time down to minutes, omitting the seconds or microseconds.
    Fix this by clicking on the "A" table header, i.e. selecting the whole first column; right-click to get the "Format Cells..." dialog, and enter a "Custom" format:
      m/d/yy h:mm:ss.000
When performing computations on the data, values marked "#N/A" which have non numerical value because they represent a status or error should be ignored by Excel.

For plots, the "X/Y scatter" plot type using time as the X axis and the value column for the Y axis tends to work best.

Note that Excel is limited to about 65000 lines. If your data file includes more lines, those will be lost in the import. You can work around this by exporting a smaller time range into separate files, or by exporting averaged data.

The value columns for averaged data will contain text like "5 [0 ... 10]" to indicate that the average value for that time was 5, with a minimum/maximum range of 0 to 10. To perform computations in excel, it might be useful to select the column and perform a text replacement of "[*]" with "" (nothing) to delete the min/max info.

Using the Exported Data in Open Office

As long as the exported data file has a ".csv" suffix, Open Office should open the file with an "import" dialog similar to MS Excel, where you select "tab" delimited columns as explained above. File names ending in ".dat", ".txt" etc. might only open in the Open Office word processor, so you have to use the correct file suffix.