[grgwrzbcki]

I'm brand new to OGSketcher -- exploring it prior to purchase. I've been unable to get time data to enter into the data columns (hours:minutes:seconds). Is time data not allowed, or is there some secret for how to do it?

Thanks.

[whpalmer4]

From the help for "Importing Data":

OmniGraphSketcher doesn’t (yet) interpret dates. If you paste in data with labels that indicate uniform spans of time, like “January 2009, February 2009, March 2009…”, they are interpreted as text and applied to the x-values 1, 2, 3…. But if your date labels are not uniformly spaced, OmniGraphSketcher doesn’t try to space them out for you. To get around this, you could first convert your dates to integers (using, for example, the DATEDIF function in Apple Numbers to calculate a number of days).

Same issue applies to time.

[igregor]

Thanks. So, is it correct to conclude that OGSketcher is NOT able to plot sunrise/sunset times versus date at present?

[whpalmer4]

Well, I wouldn't say that, but some data is more easily handled than other data. If you have a uniform spacing on the date axis, and can convert times to decimal form, it would be easy. I did a quick graph of sunrise and sunset for my location for the year (data from Wolfram Alpha):



For the Y-axis, I'm just plotting the hour + (minutes past the hour/60).

I do think it is appropriate to take note of the word "sketch" in the application's name and set expectations accordingly. It isn't a fully fledged scientific plotting package by any stretch of the imagination, but it is a handy graph sketcher.

[dave_m]

If your data is already in a Numbers spreadsheet, you can use the TIMEVALUE formula to easily convert a time to "hours since midnight" and graph it in the same way that Bill has in his screenshot. The formula should be

=(TIMEVALUE(<time>))*24

where <time> is the cell containing the time in date/time format.

[whpalmer4]

Ah, I had my data in a Numbers doc, but apparently didn't browse the function list carefully enough! :-) Learn something new here every day!