I’ve developed an extremely complex set of macros to make a VERY useful set of programs in Excel to acquire, analyze, plot and output my 3-D matrix spectroscopy data. µsoft is killing XP and upgrading to Office 2010 or 13 would be prohibitively expensive. I just loaded one of my files into Open Office Calc (it came with the Win 7 used Computer I just bought) and it doesn’t allow macros, nor do the 3-D or Contour plots bare any resemblance to my original Excel.
There just has to be a way as I believe I read that LibreOffice is “completely compatible” with µsoft Office.
Please download the latest LibreOffice, that would be 4.2.2 and try with that. Quite many things have improved in recent years. With a little work from your part it is likely possible to make it usable, although the results may not look exactly the same. Care to share the file?
I have gathered four examples of 3-D plots (jpg) made with Excel, my app in True BASIC, my app in Matlab, and a Matlab app. However, I’m don’t know how to share these pics.
Karolus suggests (below) combining Matplotlib, numpy, and iPython. The ‘beauty’ (from µsoft? you say!) of using Excel for all the steps (once I figured out how to do it - very hard) is that I don’t have to move the data from one app to another to another. As for iPython, though it may be a very good program, I’m extremely reluctant to put any of my data into the Cloud. In addition, these days all my data is acquired with a computer still using Win 2000 (updates being unavailable for the spectroscopy software).
Answer to your own question, there you are able to upload files and images. Or you could upload your pictures to http://imagesup.net/
As for “moving data between applications”, that is not true, that approach need you to write a Python script, which opens your data file, then you process it if needed and finally output the results to a graph. It’s easiest to work on such thing when using some flavour of Linux. You can control every aspect of the thing, but would need to write or adapt a script.
See answer to this question, it shows how 4 lines of python code plot some data, super easy stuff: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19170511/plotting-data-from-csv-using-matplotlib-pyplot