MagicPlot

Any new arrival on the technical graphics scene is going to have its initial successes with those who are not already committed to investment in existing tools so, while I would recommend MagicPlot to many established users, I will concentrate here on its particular strengths for those who fall into the ‘first buyer market’. For that reason, I’ve done a lot of testing with non-statisticians and non-mathematicians doing analytic work in their own specialisms, particularly students at various levels.

The first point of appeal for this group is financial affordability: the full commercial version costs just over €100 and there is a free student version (with constrained feature set – all descriptions here are of the full product) as well. Then there is the appeal of a very clean, straightforward, easy to learn graphical interface, with little to confuse. The program itself is quick, responsive and light on its feet. Installation has a simplicity which reminded me of the best side of MS-DOS days when all one had to do was put a disk in a drive and start work – you can run MagicPlot from a USB flash drive, taking it and its data files with you from machine to machine. Both full and student versions can be installed on the same machine (though not simultaneously).

The freedom to move is not limited to a single operating system, either; there are versions available for recent releases of Windows, Mac OS and flavours of UNIX, so long as a current (32- or 64-bit) Java installation is present. [More...]