The Data Wizard provides a graphical quick and easy way of importing data into Kst- automatically creating vectors, curves, power spectra, and plots. To launch the wizard, select Tools->Data Wizard or click on the icon in the toolbar. The Data Source pane will appear as following and you will need to select a data source file.

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Selecting Data

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Here you can select the fields you wish to import into Kst. The right and left arrow buttons allow you to move data vectors back and forth between the Available data and the Selected data lists. The up and down arrow buttons allow you to move the positions of the selected vectors up and down in the Selected data list. You may filter the list of fields by entering a string to match (wildcards such as * are supported) into the text box above the list. Click the Next button to advance to the Data Presentation pane.

Presentation

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The Data Range section is used to specify the range of data to read from the selected vectors in the input file. For information about these parameters, read the description of the Vector data object.

Power Spectrum and X axis settings can be specified within the Plot Types section. These settings are described below.

XY, Power Spectrum, and XY and Power Spectrum

Select whether to plot the data (XY) only, Power spectrum only, or both. If the power spectrum is selected for plotting, additional settings in this section become available.

X Axis Vector

The vector to be used as the independent vector for the plots. You may select a field from your data file, or the INDEX vector. The INDEX vector is simply a vector containing elements from 0 to N-1, where N is the number of frames in the data file.

The FFT Options subsection in the Plot Types section is available only if a power spectrum is to be plotted. Detailed information on these options can be found in the Spectrum section.

Once you are satisfied with all the settings, click the Next button to advance to the final window.

Configure Plot Layout

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From here, you can change general plot settings. Most of the settings are self-explanatory. A brief overview of each section is provided below.

Curve Style

Select whether to plot data points only, lines connecting the data points only, or both. By default, lines are continuous with weight 0, and data points are marked using crosses. Line and data point colors are chosen so that curves with identical colors are minimized. Note that the curve style settings apply to both Power Spectra and XY plots.

Curve Placement

Select the plots to place the new curves on. Cycle through distributes the curves on the plots by cycling through the plots.

For example, if you have 4 curves, and you choose to cycle through 2 plots. The result will be that curve 1 is placed in plot 1; curve 2 is in plot 2, and this is the first plot cycle. Curve 3 is back to plot 1; curve 4 goes to plot 2, and this is the second cycle. Note that the curve placement settings apply to both Power Spectra and XY plots.

Label Generation

Select the desired labels and legends to be placed on the plots.

Plot Placement

Select the desired window(s) to place the new plots in. New windows can be created for the plots by selecting In new window.

Power Spectrum Axis Mode

Select these check-boxes if you would like the automatically created power spectra to have logarithmic X or Y axes.

Once you are satisfied with all the settings, click the Finish button and the plots will be generated.

The Data menu provides quick access to many features related to data objects in Kst. Most of the menu functions duplicate functions found elsewhere, so only brief descriptions are provided below.

Data mode allows precise viewing of the data points used in a plotted data object. To toggle data mode, select Plots->Data Mode, or click the Data Mode icon on the Toolbar. Now, when the cursor is moved over a plot, a colored dot will indicate the closest data point to the cursor, as shown in the screenshot below. The status bar will display the coordinates of the data point (in terms of the x and y vectors used to plot the data object) in the status bar at the lower left corner of the Kst window. The status bar will also display the x, y, and z coordinates of any visible image. If images overlap, only the coordinates of the topmost image will be displayed. Note that all zooming functions are still available while in data mode.

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One common mode of using Kst is to create a “session” of plots and analysis for a particular type of data. Then, the same plots and analysis can be performed easily on another set of data simply by changing the data source file, provided that the two data files are similar. For example, for ASCII data files, similar data files need to have same number of fields.

The Change Data File dialog can be accessed by choosing Tools->Change Data File or clicking on the icon in the toolbar. The dialog which appears is shown below:

To use this dialog, select the vectors which you would like to change the data file of using the list in the middle of the dialog. The All From, Clear, Select All, and search field can help you to do this. The use of wildcards is supported in the search field.

Then, select a new data file and press Configure button to configure data source. If the Change selected vectors and matrices radio button is selected, then when you press the Apply or OK button, the plots of the selected data vectors will be replaced by the data vectors loaded from the same fields of the new data file that you specified.

If the Duplicate selected vectors and matrices radio button is selected, vectors coming from the new file will be plotted together with the existing vectors in exactly the same way.

If some of the selected vectors have dependents (curves, spectra, histograms, etc.) then the Duplicate dependents option allows you to duplicate these objects as well.

The Change Data Sample Ranges dialog can be accessed through the Tools menu or the icon in the toolbar. It allows you to modify how a set of vectors are read in from their associated files. The options are detailed in the Data Range option of the Data Vectors documentation.

As mentioned above, most data tools have corresponding icons in the toolbar. There are also some useful icons commonly seen in various dialogs.