A colleague introduced me to a rather nice data analysis package
the other day. FlexPro (http://flexpro.adeptscience.co.uk) isn’t
new - it’s
in Version 6 - but Adept Scientific has recently taken on UK distribution
and support of this Germandeveloped software, so no doubt we’ll
be hearing a lot more about it. What I liked about FlexPro was the
Excel look and feel, such as Wizards to help you build and customise
charts. There’s
a Wizard for creating and designing tables too, with display attributes
(page breaks, merged cells, vertical text etc) reminiscent of Excel.
Numerical values can be presented in engineering units.
Particularly useful is the ability to highlight
and select an area of interest in a graph or table as a separate
object, which you can look at in detail without getting distracted.
You can arrange these, along with formatted text and drawing objects,
in your FlexPro document to create exactly the report you need,
with headers and footers, illustrations (so there’s
no problem if you’re required to include your
company logo in each report), and automatic page breaks. Of course
you can export all the information to your word processor instead;
but generating your reports from FlexPro itself is a real time-saver.
FlexPro can handle data from Excel and from
ODBC databases, binary data from your measuring instruments and
ASCII text files; and there are modules that allow you to work
directly with data from popular data acquisition programs such
as LabVIEW, DASYLab, Agilent VEE and TestPoint. There are several
useful add-ons available for FlexPro: acoustics and spectral analysis,
among others.
If you use National Instruments test
and measurement hardware, you may want to look at that company’s
DIAdem software (www.ni.com/diadem). This is an interactive tool
for managing, inspecting and analysing test data, with a graphical,
drag-and-drop environment for creating reports. DIAdem’s built-in
VB scripting engine lets you automate both analysis and reporting
tasks. There’s
connectivity to a wide variety of industry standard file and database
formats, and you can import your own custom-defined data files. Vehicle
designers, in particular, will like DIAdem’s
add-on crash test toolset. Both FlexPro and DIAdem are available
in three configurations, depending on the number of analysis, reporting
and scripting options you need; DIAdem tends to be the more expensive
choice at all levels. DIAdem is of course compatible with NI’s
LabVIEW, though LabVIEW users will probably want to consider a cheaper
option for producing their reports: the LabVIEW Report Generation
Toolkit for Microsoft Office (www.ni.com/toolkits)
is a library of
flexible, easy-to-use VIs for creating and editing Word and Excel
reports from LabVIEW.
Engineers whose work involves a great deal
of number crunching are likely to be using the high-level technical
language MATLAB (www.mathworks.com), which includes tools for analysing
and visualising data. However, if you need more than the basic
statistical and curve-fitting functions, you’ll have
to add some expensive toolboxes to what is already a fairly pricey
base system. Similarly, if you want to automate the documentation
process, you’ll need
the add-on MATLAB Report Generator.
Increasingly, engineering and manufacturing organisations
are looking towards a more structured data format for reports.
XML is becoming more and more popular (and not just for Web pages)
because it structures and encapsulates technical information in
a compact format that can be shared between different computing
systems, while providing the means to define document types easily.
The latest version of Mathcad
(http://mathcad.adeptscience.co.uk) - widely used to perform and
document design calculations - lets you save your files in XML
format so that calculations and results can be searched and referenced
by other XML-enabled systems. Another recent release is Publicon
(www.wolfram.com), an XML document creation tool from the makers
of Mathematica.
Dr
Know's recommended download is the Flexpro 30 day trial version
- download yours today.