– layout: page title: Features of Altaxo permalink: /features.html —

GUI

• Altaxo has the GUI of SharpDevelop and as such, it features pads and views, including an internal help view.
• Worksheet Views (as many tables as you want)
• Support for a huge number of columns (I tested it with a hundred thousand)
• Property columns (this are “horizontal” columns) that hold meta-data for the columns (for instance column labels, column units, or numbers)
• Simple dragging for change of column width
• Selecting rows, columns and property columns, even non-contiguous regions
• Copy and paste of selected areas, if the region does not match, the transposed region will be pasted in (if this matches better)
• Renaming of columns / worksheets / graph. Allows to use arbitrary names for the items.
• Project explorer shows all graphs and tables
• Graph and Worksheet views can be closed without removing the underlying graph / table (they can be opened again using the project explorer)
• Output text pane to show fitting results and messages. Also quite usefull when debugging worksheet scripts
• File pane for browsing the file system and direcly open or import files.
• Graphs can be embedded into MS Word, PowerPoint etc. (all COM Container applications), or linked.

Plotting

• Line and scatter plots (and both combined) with a lot of options, including fill styles and drop styles.
• Label style (labels can either be attached to the data point, or to one of the axes)
• Drop styles, error bars (both horizontal and vertical), fill styles, etc.
• Column charts and bar charts, including stacked charts and percentage charts
• Density plots (2D histograms)
• Support for different layers. Layers can be rotated, scaled, and linked to other layers.
• Layers can be nested.
• Support for different coordinate systems. Currently implemented is 2D cartesic and 2D polar coordinate systems.
• Support for graphics elements (only the text element can be edited and created by menu; image, line, rectangle elements are supported by the library)
• Density images, i.e. visualization of 2-dim. meshed data, currently only in cartesic coordinates with linear axes.

• 3D plots (mesh plots, scatter plots, bar and column plots) by use of DirectX 11

• Notes

• Notes are Markdown documents that can be created inside of Altaxo.
• Notes can contain text, images, and links to Altaxo graphs.
• Notes can contain formulas in LaTeX notation.
• Notes can be exported to MAML or to Word documents, including the formulas.

Input / output

• ASCII import with automatic structure and number format recognition
• Picture import (as brightness values)
• Galactic® SPC file import (multiple files selectable)
• Import of many more file formats (Excel files, Bruker Opus files, JCamp, Nexus HDF5, Nicolet, Princeton Instruments, Renishaw, WiTec).
• Import of Origin .OPJ files.
• Import of Markdown documents.
• The Altaxo document is stored as ZIP-file. The worksheets and graphs are stored in XML file format inside of the ZIP-file. Support for versioning.

Output

• ASCII export (tab separated)
• Excel export (xlsx format)
• Galactic® SPC file export wizard
• Export of graphs as WMF (Windows Metafile)
• Export of partial least squares (PLS) calibration files (XML format)
• Bulk export of selected notes, tables and graphs, to MS Word files, Excel files, and a selectable image format (png, jpg, bmp, emf, wmf).
• Pushing of selected graphs to an open Word or PowerPoint document.
• Embedding of graphs as OLE/COM objects into Word, PowerPoint, Excel etc.

Data analysis / data processing

• Complex number library.
• Growing collection of special functions (Bessel related functions, Gamma related function, Error functions, spherical functions, scientific functions (most of them are C# translations of Berndt Gammel’s C++ Matpack library)
• Random number generators, probability distributions.
• Interpolation functions: polynomial interpolation, rational interpolation, cubic splines and and and…
• Polynomial fitting
• Fourier transformation code (FFT algorithm in 1 or 2 dimensions, 1 dimensional FFT of arbitrary length)
• Chemometric methods, like partial least squares analysis (PLS), and principal component regression (PCR)
• Matrix operations (some are from Lutz Roeder’s mapack library)
• Statistics (column statistics, row statistics)
• Non-linear fitting. Multiple fit functions can be fitted simultaneously. Parameters can be shared between multiple fitting functions.
• Support for parameter constraints (upper and lower bounds).
• Routines for spectrum processing, including spectral preprocessing (cosmic ray removal, baseline subtraction, cropping, normalization etc.) and automatic peak finding and peak fitting
• specialized routines for calibration of Raman spectra

Scripting / programming

• Column scripts, worksheet scripts, function scripts, fit function scripts and more.
• Script language is C# - you can use the whole bunch of classes of the .NET framework and all the classes of Altaxo itself!
• Script execution is very fast since the scripts are compiled.
• All scripts with syntax highlighting and code completion feature. You will see the documentation summary of the function/class.
• Help pane with Altaxo class reference
• Addin support (addins are DLLs that are linked to the program, see the SharpDevelop project)

Localization

Altaxo comes with an english user interface. The code (the class names and the comments) you can refer to in your scripts is also in english. So far no plans exist to localize Altaxo to other languages. Due to the localization support of the SharpDevelop project used for the Gui, it should be possible to localize Altaxo for other languages.