8.13.8.4 Plot Setup Quick Start


To open Plot Setup dialog, you can

  • activate the worksheet, do not highlight any data, then choose any available plot type menu items below Plot.

Or

  • activate the graph, right click on the layer icon at the top-left corner and select Plot Setup...

This dialog allows you to create graphs, modify plot type, add/remove plots, group/ungroup plots, and change the plot range.

What can I do with the Plot Setup dialog?

To create/add new plot

Plot setup quickstart 01.png
  1. With the Plot Setup dialog open, specify the source worksheet(s) location in the Available Data list, and further select the source worksheet(s) in the upper panel.
  2. In the middle panel, select/change plot type if needed.
  3. Select the desired plot designation for each column.
  4. In the lower panel, select the target layer. Click Add button to add the selected column(s) to the lower panel.

To modify plot(s)

To change plot order

Plot setup quickstart 03.png

See Also a quick example.

To change the plot type

Plot setup quickstart 05.png

See Also a quick example.

To group/ungroup plots

Plot setup quickstart 04.png

To group a set of plots,

  1. With the Plot Setup dialog opens, select the desired plots, right click and select Group

To upgroup a set of plots,

  1. With the Plot Setup dialog opens, right click on the Group branch and select Ungroup.

See a quick example of grouping plots.

To change the plot range

Plot setup quickstart 02.png

  1. With the Plot Setup dialog open, select the plot of which you want to change range in the lower panel. Click the Range cell and the ... button show up. Click the ... button to open the Range dialog.
  2. Uncheck Auto for From or To, and then specify the new range. Note that the range here is by raw index, not Y values.

See also a quick example.

Why Plot Setup?

Origin provides plenty of buttons and several dialog tools to plot data. Among them the Plot Setup dialog has particular advantages in some cases.

To plot from multiple sheets

You may want to create a group of plots from multiple sheets. These sheets usually have the same or similar data structure. Using the Plot Setup dialog, you can select columns from multiple sheets and plot them at one time. Below is a simple example showing how to create a stacked histogram from multiple worksheets.

  1. Use the ImpASC dialog to import file \Samples\Statistics\automobile.dat. Then perform Unstack Columns, setting Year column as Group Column(s) and Engine Displacement column as Data to be Unstacked. We then have a worksheet with 13 columns, one for a year.
  2. Highlight the whole UnstackCols worksheet and create a group of histograms. Double click on the histograms to open the Plot Details dialog. Go to the Data tab. Click the Go button in the Bin Worksheet group. Now we get 13 bin worksheets appended to the source workbook. They have the same structure.
  3. Click New Graph button Button New Graph.png on the Standard toolbar to create a blank graph window. Right click on the Layer 1 icon.png icon at the top-right corner of the graph window and select Plot Setup... to bring up the Plot Setup dialog.
  4. In the upper panel, select Worksheets in Folder for Available Data on the left. Press CTRL or SHIFT+CTRL keys to select all 13 bin worksheets on the right-side table.
  5. In the middle panel, select Stacked Column / Bar for Plot Type on the left.
  6. On the right hand side, only the common columns in all 13 worksheets show in the available column table. Select Col(A) for X and Col(B) for Y.
  7. In the lower panel, select the target layer, Layer 1 and click Add button to add the 13 plots into Layer 1. The plots added this way are grouped automatically.
  8. Click OK button to create the stacked histogram.
Plot setup quickstart 06.png

See also another tutorial here

Switch between different layers easily

Make plot assignment quickly

Generally, the plot designation has already been set in the source worksheet. To quickly make the plot designation in Plot Setup:

  • click Plotsetup dialog-mode change.png button to show the Y column only. This way you select the Y column and the associated X column will be used for plotting automatically.

For example, to plot a Scatter+ErrorBar graph from Sheet 1 below,

Plot setup quickstart 07e.png
  1. With the Plot Setup open, specify Sheet 1 location on the upper panel.
  2. On the middle panel, select Scatter for the plot type on the left.
  3. On the right side, click Plotsetup dialog-mode change.png to switch to Customer Designation Mode to use designation in the source worksheet. Highlight all columns in the table and click Add to add them to the lower panel.
  4. Click OK button to create a Scatter+Error Bar graph.

See Also
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