Selection in Table of wave of different lengths

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Fri, 09/08/2017 - 03:20 am

Hello everyone,

Could anyone please make a suggestion on how to select multiple waves in a table when the different waves to be selected have different lengths?

Here's the point: I often do BoxPlots to compare the outcome of different experimental conditions, but more frequently than not the waves I compare do not have the same number of datapoints.
The BoxPlot functionality in Igor allows for the multiple selection of waves from which it makes a box-plot for every wave.
This is likely not to be a problem programmatically, but through the GUI in order to be able to select them in a table, the waves have to be adjacent to each other and in the same number of points.
The workaround I found was to introduce NANs, which I do by copying empty cells from a spreadsheet (Excel) and pasting empty cells on the shorter waves.

I know this is silly, so could anyone please make some suggestions on how to improve this using just Igor.

Many thanks!!

Have a good weekend!

R.
Hi,

I'm not sure what you are asking. I know what you mean about not being able to select in a table across waves with different length as though it were a spreadsheet. But, what I don't get is why you want to do this... I think the box plot can handle waves with unequal lengths from the top table or top graph.

September 8, 2017 at 05:05 am - Permalink

Hi SJR51, thanks for replying!

As I create a table to have just the waves I want to do a BoxPlot, the first cell of the first column comes automatically highlighted.
When I then call the panel to do the BoxPlot, indeed I select "From Top Table", but within that top table, it seems that the BoxPlot functionality automatically looks for selected waves and does not take in all the waves in that table.
Even without attempting to select a wave, the wave in the very first column of the table comes as a default selection.

From my experience, I have to manually select the wave I want to plot.
In doing that manual selection, I typically want to have more than one boxplot / graph, so I need to select multiple waves - hence, my question.

Am I missing something?

Best,

R.

September 8, 2017 at 05:26 am - Permalink

A table selection is required to be rectangular and you can not select cells beyond the end of a wave. So you can not select the entirety of waves of unequal length.

But you can select, for example, the first row (row zero) of waves of unequal length, and this is all that the Box Plot feature requires. If you click in "0" in the Point column, it will select the first cell of each wave. You can then click Do It in the Wave Percentiles panel to create a box plot.

September 8, 2017 at 05:59 am - Permalink

Oh, I get the point!

Should have posted this way earlier!!

Thank you!!!

Cheers,
R.

September 8, 2017 at 06:10 am - Permalink

The good news is that Igor 8 will have built-in box plots, with a dialog to help you select waves for the boxes. It will make it much easier to have more than one set of boxes on one graph, and it will support "jitter" for the raw data points.

John Weeks
WaveMetrics, Inc.
support@wavemetrics.com

September 11, 2017 at 01:41 pm - Permalink