[analyticalbiochemist]

Have been using OmniGraphSketcher for quantum mechanical and biochemical systems, have been impressed with the quality of plotting, but many features are still necessary to eliminate the need for Excel's graphing capabilities. I am going to email my feature requests to support, but I wanted input on what others in our disciplines see as omissions that would enable them to consistently use the application in their fields.

1.) Multiple regressions other than linear: logarithmic, power, exponential, polynomial, moving average, order and period. Ideally, we should be able to do regression analysis by specifying each variable and parameter.

2.) Limits of axis scales need to be adjusted to use scientific exponents for especially large or small datasets.

3.) More advanced statistical processing, residuals, variance, correlation coefficients (coefficient of determination is given for linear regressions currently), standard deviations of fit plots, ANOVA, MSWD, PMCC.

4.) Inclusion of some addition to replace macros, to enable finite analysis for specific fields, something more robust than applescript.

5.) Support of MathType equation import, inclusion of more graphical capabilities were mentioned in the recent Omni blog post, this is a different feature request. Also, EndNote citations import for figure descriptions.

6.) Figure descriptions, the application is and shouldn't be a word processor, but support of description below any graph should be possible.

7.) Explicit table editing for data sets.

I'll add more ideas as I go through my current work, looking at existing plots that I would not be able to do currently in OmniGraphSketcher.

[dude]

I'll add this feature even though I just made a post about it as a specific question.

http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthread.php?t=15801

I want to measure area under the curve or area of a particular shaded area.

[eallison]

From the aerospace world, I'll add:

1) Ability to reverse an axis for things like Cp plots. This alone will force me to keep using Excel.
2) Second, independent y axis (so I could plot an airfoil from a set of points along with my Cp plot, and have the airfoil scaled correctly).
3) Some sort of text format that I could use to auto-generate simple plots. If the base data could be re-imported but the styles all stay the same, that would be excellent. So I could write out this simple file that has my base data and when something changes I could just re-generate it and the plot would pick up all the changes in the data but keep all the formatting work I've done.

I'm sure there are more things.

[a11en]

I mentioned this via e-mail to support, but I think a much needed tool for engineers is some form of axes fixing ability on plots outputted by outdated machines.

To this, I'd like to add the ability to import and mask images of graphs or output from another program (image format) and overlay axes onto said image. Especially useful would be the ability to click on image points and anchor them to the axes you are making with specific values.

With a bit more robust control and defaults for all text and line-widths, this would seriously help clean up some figures for publication purposes. Would be a fantastic resource.

To this, I'd like to second the motions for nonlinear axes options including semilog and loglog plots.

The above would allow for use of the beautiful annotation this software does ontop of scanned graphs from various texts for teaching purposes etc.

(Add to that calculated areas under curves and now you also have a tool for measuring relative peak areas etc. directly from data inputted from any source.)

Big cheers,
-Allen
(who has to fix axes all the darned time - LOL)

[dpo]

In my opinion, and I've requested this from support in the past, the one feature that would bring graphsketcher to another level is the ability to paste in pdf graphics. This would enable users to paste LaTeX annotations generated with LaTeXit.

[jatowler]

It seems to me that OmniGraphSketcher has its heart in the right place right now. It is not, nor should it be, a data processing engine. For that, you have Matlab, Mathematica, SPSS, Python, or even Excel. OGS is fantastic for taking the output of those programs and making it look awesome; bloating the application and cluttering the interface with complex statistics abilities removes the simplicity that is part of what makes it so useful now. The team has many better things to work on than adding data processing that plenty of other, less pretty, applications already do quite well.

That said, I eagerly await exhaustive AppleScript support so I can automate plotting from within Matlab or Python. How cool would an OGS/AS-enabled replacement for plot() be? Also, as dpo said, adding LaTeX formatting to labels (and the legends I assume are coming), or at least PDF paste (or--dare I hope?--Linkback support to LaTeXiT) is pretty crucial for engineers to make effective plots.

I don't care much for supporting captions or citations, as neither is properly part of the graph. Your layout engine (LaTeX, Word, InDesign, whatever) provides both captions and citations; OGS need not, on the principle of keeping the application focused. If you want a caption for a completely standalone graph, you can position a label below the axes.