Editing a Data Set
Usually you edit data in other software, but you can do editing of individual data sets within PublishPlot as well. To edit any plotted data set, double click along that data. The inspector window will open with that data set selected. To edit the data set, click on the "Edit" tab. If the inspector window is already open (which can be done using the Plot Inspector menu command or tool bar icon), click on the desired plotted data set and then click on the "Edit" tab (if needed). The editing process is:
- The "Edit" tab will show a tabular form of the selected data set using tab delimited fields. The first few rows have commands to set various options for the plotted data set. The remaining lines have the x data in column 1 and y data in column 2.
- Use standard plain-text editing methods to change the data however you want. You can change, add, or remove commands at the start of the table and change or add any data values. The final edited table has to conform to the PublishPlot table format.
- If the data set has error bars, they will appear in columns 3 on and will be labeled "#PPXError" or "#PPYError". You can edit error bar data as well or add error bars by adding new "#PPXError" or "#PPYError" columns. Note that bar charts do no support x direction errors and therefore will ignore "#PPXError" columns.
- When edits are done, click the Replot button to change the previous data set to the new data.
- Use the pop-up menu to select a different data set for editing or to edit plot comments.
If you edit the data and try other editing options without replotting, PublishPlot will check if you want to replot the changed data. The options give are to "Replot," to save your edits and redraw the edited data, "Cancel," to return to editing the data set (i.e., cancel request to edit something else), or "Don't Replot," to ignore your edits and go on to editing other things (any changes you made will be lost).
As explained in help on creating plots, the recommended way to edit data is to use other software. To make changes, go back to the software and edit the plot tables. But, if you no longer have the source documents, here is work flow for editing data in other software:
- Select a plot in a PublishPlot document and choose copy (or cut) menu command.
- Switch to any software that accepts pasted text and choose paste to paste a plot table for that plot. The pasted table will have all commands needed to recreate the plot as well as all data, including errors bar columns if used. It is usually best to paste into spread sheet software (e.g., Excel). The table will be pasted into rows and columns in the spread sheet.
- Edit the data using any options in the other software. The editing can include adding, removing or changing table commands at the start of the table, adding, removing, or changing data lines, and adding, removing or editing errors bar columns.
- When done editing, copy all the text in the edited table, go back to PublishPlot and choose paste to insert the editing plot. If you used "copy" in step 1, the plot will now have the old version and the new version. You can delete the one you don't want. If you used "cut" in step 1, the plot will now have the new version.