General advice, is Datagraph suitable for me?

[dwight ingham gumbsParticipant]

Hi all, trust you are well.

So, I work in then electrical field and one of the activities I carry out is battery testing. The machine I use is called a Hioki 3554. The output is a csv file that I gather could be imported into Datagraph.

(The data import file would consist of in it’s most simple form be – column one, the battery number and column two, the value of impedance associated with that battery).

Now my question is this. I was thinking of using the ‘finding outliers’, the ‘Bar plot’ when I have one group of data moving to the ‘Bar chart’, when I have multiple sets.

Ultimately though I want to somehow show how the readings trend over time. Would DG be suitable for me?

 

Appreciate all advice, thanks.

[dgteamModerator]

Welcome to the BB!

The command I would recommend exploring would be the Pivot command.  This is more flexible than the Bars command and has a lot of support for dates built-in — works well for exploring date over time.

• CSV files are easy to import. See Get the most out of DataGraph Part 1.  We will have Part 2 in this series out soon.
• Date/Time is handled using the a Date column. This is very flexible in how dates can be imported and represented.

We have several ways to parse the data that can save you a lot of time.  If you can send more information about your file format we can provide more detailed advice.  For example, how many files will you generate over time?  How many rows/columns in the files?

You are welcome to post a screen shot of your data format or you can email us an example file at “help at visualdatatools.com”.

 

 

[dwight ingham gumbsParticipant]

Oh, hi. Thanks for coming back to me so quickly.

So basically. What happens is I go to site and on the first visit, I have a dataset. This data set if for x batteries, (88 in this case), and each battery will have a value of impedance attached to it as illustrated below, (I’ve only grabbed the first 22 readings here). Only columns A and B are important at this stage. The top row is unimportant.

6 months after that visit, I’ll do the same thing again. Column A will be identical but column B will change. This will continue twice a year indefinitely. But at some stage I’d like to be able to show a trend as to how each block has changed/is changing over the years, (not even sure that’s possible).

From the day the battery is installed it would not likely be in service after 10 years so 20 sets of readings for each battery at most.

Does that help?

[dgteamModerator]

Yes!  Very helpful.  We will work on a similar example for you.

[dwight ingham gumbsParticipant]

Appreciate it – thank you.

[dgteamModerator]

Wanted to send a video with an example …

Video Demo

Basically this is a work flow for creating a couple of graphs using data that I based on your example.  Would be interested in whether these types of plots would be useful or if you want to do something different.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 11 months ago by dgteam.
• This reply was modified 4 years, 11 months ago by dgteam.

[dgteamModerator]

Updated the post above so the link should work. If not let us know.

The suggested approach requires the files would all be named the date the measurements were taken.  If you place these in the same group, then you click the gear menu to get a short cut to ‘Append subgroups’.

That creates a single group with all the data in one group and the date becomes a column.

Then you could make graph with all the batteries and calculate the summary statistics with a Pivot command.

Since you have so many batteries, you could make one graph with a mask to select a single battery at a time. Then use a slider to change the battery shown, so you can scan through all of them.

The video above shows these graphs being made.

These are just suggestions, let us know what you think.

If these graphs make sense, we can give you some advice on how to quickly add in new data.

 

[dwight ingham gumbsParticipant]

Hi, many thanks your efforts. Datagraph looks really good. I may look at other capabilities as I get more proficient with it but it would seem to do what I want and more.

Really appreciate it, I’ll get a license sorted.

 

(Is it not possible to add attachments like a csv to a forum post, it would make things easier going forward?)

• This reply was modified 4 years, 11 months ago by dwight ingham gumbs.

[dgteamModerator]

Great – Glad that looks helpful.

In terms of the forum, for now you can only upload images.

We have hesitated on allowing files, to avoid having huge files uploaded.   Also, need to make sure the data is OK to share with others. We will think more about how this could work.

For now, you can email us a file to our help email from the Help menu in DataGraph.

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