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Slide Logic: The Emergence of Presentation Software and the Prehistory of PowerPoint

By david c. brock | october 04, 2016.

In many parts of our world today, group communication centers on visual materials built with “presentation software,” often crafted by a speaker him or herself. As a result, meetings now generally depend on the use of personal computers, presentation software in the guises of product or service and display by digital projectors or flat-screens.

A humorous sample PowerPoint presentation supplied with the very first version in 1987. This clip was created with PowerPoint 1.0 for Mac running in a Mac Plus emulator.

So central have these visual materials become that the intended functioning of digital files, programs, computers, and peripherals has become an almost necessary condition for public communication. Choice of presentation software has even become a mark of generational and other identities, as in whether one uses Facebook or Snapchat. Millennials and Generation Z choose Google Slides or Prezi. Everyone else uses PowerPoint, its mirror-twin by Apple called Keynote, or, for political expression and/or economic necessity, LibreOffice. Membership in a highly technical community can be signified by using the typesetting program LaTeX to build equation-heavy slides.

It is PowerPoint, nevertheless, that has become the “Kleenex” or “Scotch Tape” of presentation software. A “PowerPoint” has come to commonly mean any presentation created with software. Microsoft rightly boasts that there are currently 1.2 billion copies of PowerPoint at large in the world today: One copy of PowerPoint for every seven people. In any given month, approximately 200 million of these copies are actively used. PowerPoint is simply the dominant presentation software on the planet. 1

It may come as a surprise, then, to learn that PowerPoint was not the first presentation program. Rather, there were several programs for personal computers that performed similarly to PowerPoint in many respects, which appeared starting in 1982—fully five years before PowerPoint’s debut. PowerPoint’s ubiquity is not the result of a first-mover advantage. 2

Further, many of PowerPoint’s most familiar characteristics—the central motif of a slide containing text and graphics, bulleted lists, the slide show, the slide sorter, and even showy animated transitions between slides—were not absolute novelties when PowerPoint appeared. These elements had been introduced in one form or another in earlier presentation software.

Here, the principal developers of PowerPoint—Dennis Austin and Tom Rudkin—describe the structure of the source code defining slides. Austin and Rudkin worked closely with the product’s architect, Bob Gaskins. This document is in a collection of materials donated to the Computer History Museum by Dennis Austin.

From 1982 through 1987, software makers introduced roughly a dozen programs for several different personal computers that allowed users to create visual materials for public presentations as a series of “slides” containing text and graphic elements. Frequently, these slides were printed on paper for incorporation into a photocopied report and transferred to a set of transparencies for use with an overhead projector. Other presentation programs allowed slides to be output as a sequence of 35mm photographic slides for use with a slide projector, a videotape of a series of slide images, or a digital file of screen-images for computer monitors. Makers and users called these programs “presentation software,” and just as commonly “business graphics software.” “Business” here is significant, I think. 3

Early presentation software was most commonly used to create overhead presentations. In this clip, Dennis Austin—a principal developer of PowerPoint—demonstrates the use of overhead projectors and presentations.

The six years from 1982 through 1987 saw the emergence of presentation software (including PowerPoint), with multiple makers introducing competing programs offering many similar capabilities and idioms. Why did multiple, independent software creators develop presentation software for personal computers at just this moment?

I believe that an analytical framework that I developed with historian Christophe Lécuyer to understand episodes in the history of solid-state electronics can also help us to unpack this very different case from software history. Our framework consists of three “contextual logics” that we argue shaped the emergence of the planar transistor, the silicon microchip, the simultaneous-invention of silicon-gate MOS technology, and, as Christophe and Takahiro Ueyama recently show, the history of blue light-emitting diodes (LEDs). 4

In their 2013 article, “The Logics of Materials Innovation,” Christophe and Takahiro describe these logics beautifully:

This framework distinguishes different types of contextual challenges that shape the creation of new materials and manufacturing processes: the materiality of substances, tools, and fabrication techniques (referred to as “material logic”); the needs, demands and interests of intended customers (“market logic”); and the competitive tensions among laboratories, firms, and nations (“competitive logic”). These material, market, and competitive logics are not determinative, in the sense that they do not lead to necessary outcomes. But they are particularly stable over time and provide powerful resources and constraints to innovators and their patrons.

The implication seems straightforward: People from similar backgrounds, in similar organizations, facing a common, structured set of contextual logics, will do similar—but not identical—things. But can these logics that help make sense of the history of semiconductor electronics, a technology deeply about materials, also give insights into the history of the ne plus ultra of the digital—software itself? I think it can. Competitive logic, Market logic, and Material logic: Let’s consider them in that order, and see what they can mean for the “prehistory” of PowerPoint.

Competitive logic centered on software makers. In the first half of the 1980s, makers of presentation software were typically connected to companies. There were, of course, makers of non-commercial software of various stripes—hobbyist, open source, libre and the like—but they do not appear to have been a factor in early presentation software. Rather, the makers of presentation software were what I call “integrated software manufacturers,” “software publishers,” and “author houses.” Sometimes the boundaries between these maker-types are blurry, but I think the categories are useful.

Integrated software manufacturers, ranging from cottage firms to public companies, wrote code, manufactured it mainly on magnetic media, wrote and printed technical documentation and guides, and distributed it in shrink-wrapped boxes. For integrated software manufacturers of this era, think of Microsoft, Lotus Development, and MicroPro International." Software publishers" did everything that the integrated manufacturers did, except write the code. Rather, they entered into contracts on a royalty basis with those who did write programs. Software publishers ran the gamut from stand-alone companies that only produced software written by others, to firms that published a mix of programs written internally and externally, and also to computer makers like Apple, who published software written by others under their own label as well as selling their own programs. Code authors ranged from individual sole proprietorships to “author shops,” partnerships between two or more programmers in an LLP or a small company.

The origins of Microsoft, perhaps the best-known integrated software manufacturer.

These author shops, publishers, and integrated manufacturers were, by 1982, competing in a growing market for personal computer application software: Spreadsheets, word processors, databases and “business graphics” programs that often used data from spreadsheets to generate line-graphs, pie-charts, bar-graphs, and other standard plots used in business, science, and engineering. This battle for market share in applications for personal computers was the ‘competitive logic’ for presentation software’s emergence. 5

“Market logic” centered on the intended users of software, and, in the case of presentation software, focused to the communication practices of white-collar workers in the United States (and, perhaps, elsewhere), particularly “managers” and “executives.” Contemporary commentators noted that personal-computer “business” software like spreadsheets represented a turn in “office automation,” the opening of a new phase in which software users would expand beyond specialists and secretaries to managers and executives. Personal computers with new software would be in the offices of Mahogany Row in addition to the accounting department and the typing pool.

For example, in September 1982, John Unger Zussman, a columnist for InfoWorld, noted: “…the market is changing. An examination of the changing word-processor marketplace can tell us a lot about the maturation of microcomputers and give us a clue to the role of micros in the office of the future. ‘There’s an expanding concept of reality in the modern office,’ says Gary Smith, NCR’s director of marketing. Software oriented toward managers, such as spreadsheet and slide-show programs and electronic mail, has increased the demand for distributed data processing. It is now legitimate for a computer to appear on a manager’s desk—or a secretary’s. The personal workstation, says Smith, is becoming ‘the major focus of white-collar productivity.’ This was not always the case. In the past, computers were the province of the data-processing department…and, besides, managers wouldn’t be caught dead typing at a keyboard…word processing became a stepping-stone into the automated office…the introduction of microcomputers into the office of the future seems to be more a process of infiltration than one of direct assault.” 6

In this 1979 commercial, Xerox presented just this vision of the office of the future.

In a 1984 article in the Proceedings of the IEEE titled “A New Direction in Personal Computer Software,” MIT Sloan School professor Hoo-Min Toong, with his postdoc Amar Gupta, identified the crux of the market logic to which presentation software was a response: The time that executives and managers spent in meetings. They write: “Top managers are noted to spend four-fifths of their time attending meetings—delivering or receiving presentations and reports, communicating, and gathering information for subsequent meetings. Meetings are the most prominent, time consuming element of an executive’s job.” They continue: “At present, business personal computers only represent information in numeric form, in text, and in simple charts and graphs. A crucial missing component is the ability to present and manipulate visual, pictorial data…A new layer…will bridge the gap from the present position…to supporting business communications with sophisticated images and color.” 7

Toong and Gupta’s diagram of the proportion of an “executive’s” time spent in meetings. © 1984 IEEE. Reprinted, with permission, from Proceedings of the IEEE.

Toong and Gupta then discuss a newly released example of such “presentation graphics software,” VCN ExecuVision, offered by the book publisher Prentice-Hall. VCN ExecuVision, which ran on the IBM PC, cost $400 but also required libraries of images and icons, that is, “clip art,” at $90 per floppy disk. Users could create “slide shows” of multiple “slides” that the user could craft with text, clip art, and geometric shapes, as well as pie, bar, and line graphs, with the completed slide show either printed or displayed on the PC monitor.

The idiom of the slide was directly adapted from the world of 35mm photographic slides. “Seeing a single slide is one thing,” Toong and Gupta write, “seeing an aggregate of slides is another. VCN ExecuVision supports slide shows in which the transition from one slide to another can be controlled either manually (pressing a key causes display of the next slide) or automatically… More significant is the support of animation techniques which give an illusion of seeing a running movie rather than a slide show…VCN ExecuVision brings sophisticated graphical capabilities to the realm of personal computers thus vastly expanding the horizons of personal computer applications in all four domains – office, home, science, and education.” Continuing their celebration of ExecuVision, Toong and Gupta illustrated their journal article with three full-color pages of ExecuVision slides, replete with images having the unmistakable aesthetic of clip art. Presentation software and clip art may have been born together.

Sample slides from VCN ExecuVision. © 1984 IEEE. Reprinted, with permission, from Proceedings of the IEEE.

Evidently, ExecuVision was the creation of Toong himself—in a Cambridge, Massachusetts author shop called Visual Communication Network Inc.—before the program had been sold or licensed to Prentice Hall. Toong filed articles of incorporation for the firm in October 1983, with his brother and a former MIT industrial liaison as the other directors. His brother was listed as the president and a Sloan School building was the firm’s address. Toong’s connection to ExecuVision is not mentioned in the article. 8

Lotus’ announcement of Executive Briefing System. Courtesy of the Kapor Archive.

Toong’s ExecuVision was, in late 1983, a new entrant into the presentation software market that two new integrated software manufacturers, located in neighborhoods on opposing sides of the MIT campus, had already enjoined. On one side was Mitch Kapor’s startup, Lotus Development. Kapor created his new firm on a windfall from two programs he had written that were published by Personal Software, Inc., later renamed VisiCorp. VisiCorp was also the publisher of the breakthrough spreadsheet program VisiCalc, written in Cambridge by Software Arts Inc., the “author shop” of Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston.

Mitch Kapor had written a statistical analysis and data graphing program for the Apple II called TinyTROLL, which he sold through a partnership with his friend and then MIT finance PhD student Eric Rosenfeld who had suggested the program to Kapor. The partnership was called Micro Finance Systems, and Kapor was approached VisiCorp to adapt TinyTROLL to work with data imported from VisiCalc. Kapor soon delivered VisiPlot and VisiTrend, programs that took VisiCalc spreadsheet data and generated pie, bar, and line graphs from them, as well as performed various finance-relevant statistical functions on the data. Kapor and Rosenfeld’s Micro Finance Systems received hundreds of thousands of dollars in royalties for VisiPlot and VisiTrend before VisiCorp bought them outright for $1.2 million. With his share in the windfall, Kapor set up an integrated software manufacturer of his own, Lotus Development, and, in 1982, the firm released its first product, Executive Briefing System, for the Apple II. Todd Agulnick, a 14-year-old high school student, had been hired by Kapor and wrote the BASIC code for Executive Briefing System under his direction. 9

Lotus’ $200 Executive Briefing System was centered on the color video display of the Apple II. In brief, a number of programs for charting and graphing like VisiPlot offered the “BSAVE” command. Instead of routing data to immediately render an image on the video display, BSAVE sent the very same data to a stored file. In this way, a “screen shot” could be rendered on the video display at a later time, shared with others, archived for future use, etc. Lotus’ Executive Briefing System treated BSAVE’d files—these screen shots—as “slides” that could be modified and then displayed on the Apple II’s video display as a “slide show” for a “presentation.” Executive Briefing System users could edit slides of charts and plots by adding text and/or clip art of lines, geometric shapes, or “ornamental” motifs. Slides were arranged in slide shows, and saved to floppy disk. While the program allowed a slide show to be printed—as a paper report or for transparencies for overhead presentation—it focused on slide shows for the video display. A variety of animated “transitions” between slides were available, such as fades, wipes, and spinning-into-view. 10

An early Executive Briefing System demonstration. This clip was created by running an image of the demonstration disk in an Apple II emulator.

David Solomont’s Business and Professional Software Inc., another integrated software manufacturer developing products for the Apple II, was located at 143 Binney Street just a 25-minute walk across the MIT campus—and past Hoo-Min Toong’s office—from Kapor’s Lotus Development office at 180 Franklin Street. Like Kapor, Solomont’s firm had earlier developed a plotting and charting program for the Apple II to work with VisiCalc spreadsheets. Solomont struck a deal with Apple to license the plotting program, which was sold by Apple under the company’s brand as “Apple Business Graphics.” Soon thereafter, arriving on the market about the same time as Lotus’ Executive Briefing System, came Solomont’s “Screen Director” program in 1982. 11

A 2015 CHM oral history interview with David Solomont.

Screen Director, made for the then-new Apple III computer, fully embraced treating a computer running Screen Director like a 35mm slide projector. Users could organize BSAVE’d image files from programs like VisiPlot and Apple Business Graphics into various “slide trays” for presentation on the video display. While Screen Director did not allow for the editing of existing image slides, it did provide for the creation of text slides and for a limited set of animated transitions between slides. Screen Director even shipped with the standard two-button wired controller for slide projectors, but modified to plug into the Apple III for controlling Screen Director slide shows. 12

A 1982 print advertisement for Business and Professional Software’s Screen Director program.

So far I have described a meaning for “competitive logic” and “market logic” in the case of presentation software, and some early programs from 1982 through 1984. But what of “material logic?” Material logic here includes personal computers themselves, specifically personal computers with graphics capabilities that were expanding in the early 1980s. The computers’ physical performativity, their material agency, constituted a resource, medium, and constraint for software makers and users. Existing programs widely used on these computers, like spreadsheets and plotting programs, were themselves a critical part of the material logic. Software, like hardware, has an unavoidable materiality. At the most abstract, a computer program can be considered to be a specific pattern. In practice, every instance of a program is a pattern in something material, including the body of an author.

Finally, the material logic for presentation software included operating systems centered on the graphical user interface, or GUI. This style of computing had been pioneered at Xerox PARC in the late 1970s, most famously on the Xerox Alto computer. The Alto inspired other efforts to bring the GUI into personal computing during the first half of the 1980s: Apple’s Lisa and Macintosh computers, Microsoft’s Windows software, and VisiCorp’s VisiOn software to name but a few. 13

This material logic was especially important in the creation of PowerPoint. In 1983, two Apple managers, Rob Campbell and Taylor Pohlman, left the firm and created a new integrated software manufacturer, Forethought Inc. Simply put, they left Apple to bring a Xerox Alto like GUI operating system to the IBM PC. By 1986, however, Forethought Inc. had a change of plans. This story—of Forethought’s creation of PowerPoint—and other stories about what PowerPoint and its competitors can tell us about software history, will be the subjects of upcoming essays by me on the @CHM blog.

For more information about the development of PowerPoint, please see our Guide to the Dennis Austin PowerPoint Records .

• Oral history interview with Shawn Villaron, PowerPoint manager at Microsoft, date, forthcoming/in process.
• Indeed, a wonderfully helpful list of presentation software offerings from 1986 compiled by Robert Gaskins, the initiator and architect of the original PowerPoint project, can be found on pages 131-134 of his painstakingly detailed and comprehensive memoir, Sweating Bullets .
• One place in which these identifying names for the presentation software genre were evident was, and is, the pages of the trade magazine InfoWorld . Google Books has a large number of issues of the periodical available with full text and search. On the more general use of the genre names, see this Google Books NGram .
• See Christophe Lécuyer and David C. Brock, Makers of the Microchip: A Documentary History of Fairchild Semiconductor (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010); David C. Brock and Christophe Lécuyer, “Digital Foundations: The Making of Silicon Gate Manufacturing Technology,” Technology and Culture , 53 (2012): 561–97; and Christophe Lécuyer and Takahiro Ueyama, “The Logics of Materials Innovation: The Case of Gallium Nitride and Blue Light Emitting Diodes,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences , 43 (2013): 243-280.
• See, for example, Martin Campbell-Kelly, “Number Crunching without Programming: The Evolution of Spreadsheet Usability,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing , 29 3 (July-September 2007): 6-19 and Thomas J. Bergin, “The Origins of Word Processing Software for Personal Computers: 1976-1985,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing , 28 4 (October-December 2006): 32-47.
• The article may be viewed in InfoWord on Google Books.
• Hoo-Min D. Toong and Amar Gupta, “A New Direction in Personal Computer Software,” Proceedings of the IEEE , 72 3 (March 1984): 377-388.
• Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Articles of Organization, Visual Communications Network, Inc., October 13, 1983.
• Mitch Kapor, “Reflections of Lotus 1-2-3: Benchmark for Spreadsheet Software,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing , 29 3 (July-September 2007): 32-40; David C. Brock telephone call with Todd Agulnick, July 15, 2016.
• Rik Jadrnicek, “ Executive Briefing System, a slide-show program ,” InfoWorld, May 17, 1982, 47–49.
• Oral History of David Solomont , Computer History Museum, 2015. Or watch it on YouTube .
• Richard Hart, “ Screen Director helps you present ‘slide shows,’ ” InfoWorld, November 8, 1982.
• See Michael Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Comptuer Age, (New York: HarperCollins), 1999.

About The Author

David C. Brock is an historian of technology, CHM's Director of Curatorial Affairs, and director of its Software History Center. He focuses on histories of computing and semiconductors as well as on oral history. He is the coauthor of Moore’s Law: The Life of Gordon Moore, Silicon Valley’s Quiet Revolutionary.

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Walking into the hall to deliver the speech was a “ daunting experience ," the speaker later recalled, but “we had projectors and all sorts of technology to help us make the case." The technology in question was PowerPoint, the presentation software produced by Microsoft . The speaker was Colin Powell, then the U.S. Secretary of State.

Powell's 45 slides displayed snippets of text, and some were adorned with photos or maps. A few even had embedded video clips. During the 75-⁠minute speech , the tech worked perfectly. Years later, Powell would recall, “When I was through, I felt pretty good about it."

The aim of his speech, before the United Nations Security Council on 5 February 2003, was to argue the Bush administration's final case for war with Iraq in a “powerful way." In that, he succeeded. While the president had already decided to go to war, Powell's speech—inseparable from what would become one of the most famous PowerPoint presentations of all time—did nothing to derail the plan. The following month, the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and Poland launched their invasion .

Powell's speech dramatized how PowerPoint had become, by 2003, a nearly inescapable tool of communication and persuasion in much of the world. Since then, its domination has only become more complete. The same tool used by U.S. State Department and CIA officials to pivot an international coalition toward war is also used by schoolchildren to give classroom reports on planets, penguins, and poets. Microsoft rightly boasts of 1.2 billion copies of PowerPoint at large—one copy for every seven people on earth. In any given month, approximately 200 million of these copies are used, and although nobody's really counting, our cumulative generation of PowerPoint slides surely reaches well into the billions. So profound is PowerPoint's influence that prominent figures have decried the software's effects on thinking itself . Edward Tufte , the guru of information visualization, has famously railed against the “cognitive style" of PowerPoint, which he characterizes as having a “foreshortening of evidence and thought" and a “deeply hierarchical single-⁠path structure."

PowerPoint is so ingrained in modern life that the notion of it having a history at all may seem odd. But it does have a very definite lifetime as a commercial product that came onto the scene 30 years ago, in 1987. Remarkably, the founders of the Silicon Valley firm that created PowerPoint did not set out to make presentation software, let alone build a tool that would transform group communication throughout the world. Rather, PowerPoint was a recovery from dashed hopes that pulled a struggling startup back from the brink of failure—and succeeded beyond anything its creators could have imagined.

PowerPoint was not the first software for creating presentations on personal computers. Starting in 1982, roughly a half-dozen other programs [PDF] came on the market before PowerPoint's 1987 debut. Its eventual domination was not the result of first-mover advantage. What's more, some of its most familiar features—the central motif of a slide containing text and graphics; bulleted lists; the slideshow; the slide sorter; and even the animated transitions between slides—did not originate with PowerPoint. And yet it's become the Kleenex or Scotch Tape of presentation software, as a “PowerPoint" has come to mean any presentation created with software.

With PowerPoint as well as its predecessors, the motif of the slide was, of course, lifted directly from the world of photography. Some presentation programs actually generated 35-mm slides for display with a slide projector. In most cases, though, the early programs created slides that were printed on paper for incorporation into reports, transferred to transparencies for use on overhead projectors, or saved as digital files to be displayed on computer monitors.

The upshot was that personal computer users of the 1980s, especially business users, had many options, and the market for business software was undergoing hypergrowth, with programs for generating spreadsheets, documents, databases, and business graphics each constituting a multimillion-dollar category. At the time, commentators saw the proliferation of business software as a new phase in office automation, in which computer use was spreading beyond the accounting department and the typing pool to the office elites. Both the imagined and actual users of the new business software were white-collar workers, from midlevel managers to Mahogany Row executives.

PowerPoint thus emerged during a period in which personal computing was taking over the American office. A major accelerant was the IBM Personal Computer , which Big Blue unveiled in 1981. By then, bureaucratic America—corporate and government alike—was well habituated to buying its computers from IBM . This new breed of machine, soon known simply as the PC, spread through offices like wildfire.

The groundwork for that invasion had been laid the previous decade, in the 1970s technosocial vision of the “office of the future." It started, like so much of what we now take for granted in our contemporary world of networked personal computing, at Xerox's legendary Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) [PDF]. The site was established in 1970 to invent the computing systems that would equip the future's white-collar office, an arena the company hoped to dominate in the same way it did photocopying. Many of the bright young computer scientists and engineers recruited to work at PARC knew one another from the major computer science programs funded by the Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) at MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, UC Berkeley, the University of Utah, and SRI.

In 1972, PARC researchers began to focus on a new personal computer they called the Alto. Led by Alan Kay , Butler Lampson , Bob Taylor , and Chuck Thacker , they were captivated by an extraordinary idea: that in the office of the future, every individual would have a dedicated computer like the Alto. Moreover, these computers would be networked to one another and to other, larger computers, both locally and far away. This networking would form a web of communication and computing resources well beyond the capacity of any single personal computer. In the pursuit of this vision, Ethernet emerged , as did the PARC Universal Packet protocol [PDF], or PUP, an important predecessor of the TCP/IP standard of today's Internet.

The Alto's creators emphasized the machine's graphics capabilities, dedicating much of the computer's hardware and software to rendering high-⁠resolution imagery onscreen, including typography, drawings, digital photographs, and animations. It was a huge step up from the mainstream computers of the day, which still used punch cards, paper printouts, teletypes, and “dumb" terminals. Alto users interacted with it through a graphical interface to access, generate, and manipulate information. Even the text was treated as an image. The computer was controlled through a standard keyboard and the then-novel mouse that had emerged from Doug Engelbart 's SRI laboratory.

This graphical turn in computing was perhaps most pronounced in one of the Alto's programming languages, called Smalltalk. Developed by Kay, Dan Ingalls , Adele Goldberg , and other collaborators, Smalltalk wasn't just a programming language; it was also a programming and user environment. It introduced the graphical user interface, or GUI, to personal computing, including a metaphorical desktop with overlapping windows, contextual and pop-up menus, file browsers, scroll bars, selection by mouse clicks, and even cut, copy, and paste.

While such innovations were ostensibly proprietary, by the end of the 1970s, Xerox managers and PARC staff were routinely discussing their findings with outsiders and publishing details of the Alto system in journals. PARC researchers were, after all, still part of the broader ARPA community of computer scientists and engineers. Many visitors who saw the Alto system considered it transformative.

One such visitor was Apple cofounder Steve Jobs . Following Xerox's investment in Apple in 1979, PARC researchers gave Apple engineers and management detailed demonstrations of Smalltalk and other programs previously reserved for Xerox insiders. Jobs was so enthralled by what he saw that he decided to reorient the Lisa, a business computer Apple was developing at the time, to fully embrace the PARC idiom. A few years later, when Jobs was transferred out of the Lisa project, he seized control of another effort aimed at creating a low-cost computer and pushed it, too, toward the PARC idiom. That computer became the Macintosh.

What does all this have to do with PowerPoint? Apple lavished resources—people and cash alike—to embrace the PARC paradigm with the Lisa and the Macintosh, but not everyone at Apple was happy about that. In particular, those working to maintain the existing Apple II and III lines felt that their efforts were being shortchanged. By 1982, the product marketing manager for the Apple III, Taylor Pohlman , and the software marketing manager for the Apple II and III, Rob Campbell, had had enough. They quit and went into business together, founding the company that would create PowerPoint.

But PowerPoint was not at all in their original plan.

One thing that united Pohlman and Campbell—but alienated them at Apple—was that they were cut from a different cloth than the computer-science types working on the Lisa and the Macintosh. Though both Pohlman and Campbell were technically minded, they were also oriented toward marketing and sales. Before Apple, Pohlman had worked in marketing at Hewlett-Packard, and Campbell had run a small accounting software company.

The pair left Apple late in 1982, and by early 1983, they had secured US $600,000 in venture capital to create a software company, which they called Forethought. Ironically, the startup's aim was to bring the PARC idiom to the IBM PC and its clones—in essence, to outplay Apple at its own game. That year, the Apple Lisa appeared , priced at nearly $10,000 (more than $25,000 in today's dollars). Two years earlier, Xerox had brought its own personal computer, the Xerox Star , to market, at an even higher price. Pohlman and Campbell's idea was to bring a graphical-software environment like the Xerox Alto's to the hugely popular but graphically challenged PC.

Forethought's founders intended to go beyond the Star and the Lisa by incorporating an important dimension of Alto's Smalltalk: object-oriented programming . In simple terms, traditional programming of the day treated data and the procedures for manipulating it separately. In object-oriented programming, data and procedures are combined in “objects" that interact with each other by passing messages between them. Proponents held that the modularity of object-oriented programming made for speedier development, flexibility, and dynamic change. For example, skilled Smalltalk programmers could quickly alter the GUI while the program was running. Object-oriented programming has since become the prevailing paradigm for the most widely used programming languages.

Pohlman and Campbell envisioned an object-oriented software platform called Foundation, which was centered around documents. Each Foundation document would act like an object in Smalltalk, which a business user would stitch together with other documents to create, say, a report containing a graph of recent sales, a statistical analysis of customer traits, drawings of proposed changes to a product, and a block of explanatory text. Each element would be live, malleable, and programmable. Spreadsheets, databases, drawings, word processing—Foundation would handle it all. Users would select a document with a mouse click, and contextual menus would then offer choices appropriate for that type of document. Foundation would be, in essence, Smalltalk for the office worker.

Forethought staffed up, bringing in software developers from Xerox PARC who were familiar with object-oriented programming and WYSIWYG applications, in which the text and graphics displayed on screen look very similar to the way they will appear in print. To create certain functions, the startup inked deals with outside suppliers; Forethought also purchased a powerful VAX computer from Digital Equipment Corp. for the software-development effort.

Within a year, the company ran into difficulties. For one, the developers grew deeply concerned about which personal computers, if any, would be powerful enough to run Foundation. The Apple Lisa had the horsepower, but it was already failing in the market, while the Macintosh was deemed too feeble. And the IBM PC was still far behind where Forethought had hoped and planned it would be.

Forethought, a Silicon Valley startup, brought PowerPoint 1.0 to market in April 1987.

More worrying was Oracle's announcement that it would need another year to deliver on its contract for the database code. This meant that the launch of Foundation would be intolerably delayed. Forethought was running perilously low on funds, and it didn't have the resources to develop a database on its own. The company was facing, literally, an existential crisis.

Rather than liquidate the firm, management and investors decided to “restart" Forethought—a “pivot" in today's Silicon Valley parlance. Work on Foundation was set aside, while the firm focused on software publishing—that is, manufacturing, marketing, and supporting computer programs written by others. Forethought's publishing arm produced software for the Apple Macintosh under the brand Macware. And it was a success. Its biggest hit, oddly enough, was a database program called FileMaker .

With brightening finances from sales of FileMaker, Forethought began to develop a new software product of its own. This new effort was the brainchild of Robert Gaskins , an accomplished computer scientist who'd been hired to lead Forethought's product development. Gaskins was a polymath who had simultaneously pursued Ph.D.s in English, linguistics, and computer science at UC Berkeley before joining industry. He in turn hired a bright young software developer named Dennis Austin , who had previously developed compilers at Burroughs and contributed to a GUI operating system at a laptop startup.

Gaskins and Austin worked closely to conceptualize, design, and specify Forethought's new product. Gaskins spotted an opportunity in presentation software and believed they could apply the PARC idiom to this application. He envisioned the user creating slides of text and graphics in a graphical, WYSIWYG environment, then outputting them to 35-mm slides, overhead transparencies, or video displays and projectors, and also sharing them electronically through networks and electronic mail. The presentation would spring directly from the mind of the business user, without having to first transit through the corporate art department.

While Gaskins's ultimate aim for this new product, called Presenter, was to get it onto IBM PCs and their clones, he and Austin soon realized that the Apple Macintosh was the more promising initial target. Designs for the first version of Presenter specified a program that would allow the user to print out slides on Apple's newly released laser printer, the LaserWriter, and photocopy the printouts onto transparencies for use with an overhead projector.

Austin quickly got to work programming Presenter in Apple Pascal on a Lisa computer, eventually switching to a Macintosh. He was joined in the effort by Tom Rudkin , an experienced developer, and the pair hewed as closely as possible to the Macintosh's user interface and modes of operation. Indeed, the source code for Presenter included Apple-provided code for handling text, which Apple used in its own word processor, MacWrite.

In April 1987, Forethought introduced its new presentation program to the market very much as it had been conceived, but with a different name. Presenter was now PowerPoint 1.0—there are conflicting accounts of the name change—and it was a proverbial overnight success with Macintosh users. In the first month, Forethought booked $1 million in sales of PowerPoint, at a net profit of $400,000, which was about what the company had spent developing it. And just over three months after PowerPoint's introduction, Microsoft purchased Forethought outright for $14 million in cash.

PowerPoint then became Microsoft's presentation software, first just for the Macintosh and later also for Windows. The Forethought team became Microsoft's Graphics Business Unit, which Gaskins led for five years, while Austin and Rudkin remained the principal developers of PowerPoint for about 10 years. Wisely, Microsoft chose to keep the Graphics Business Unit in Silicon Valley rather than move it to Redmond, Wash. The unit became Microsoft's first outpost in the region, and PowerPoint is still developed there to this day.

While PowerPoint was a success from the start, it nevertheless faced stiff competition, and for several years, Lotus Freelance and Software Publishing's Harvard Graphics commanded larger market shares. The tipping point for PowerPoint came in 1990, when Microsoft unleashed its bundling strategy and began selling Microsoft Office—which combined Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint—as a $1,000 set. Previously, each part had been sold separately for about $500 apiece.

Because most users of personal computers required both a word processor and a spreadsheet program, Microsoft's price for Office proved compelling. PowerPoint's competitors, on the other hand, resented the tactic as giving away PowerPoint for free. And for more than a quarter century, Microsoft's competitive logic proved unassailable.

These days, the business software market is shifting again, and Microsoft Office must now compete with similar bundles that are entirely free, from the likes of Google , LibreOffice, and others. Productivity software resides more often than not in the cloud, rather than on the user's device. Meanwhile, the dominant mode of personal computing globally has firmly shifted from the desktop and laptop to the smartphone. As yet, no new vision of personal computing like the one that came from Xerox PARC in the 1970s has emerged. And so for the moment, it appears that PowerPoint, as we know it, is here to stay.

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Blog > The History and Evolution of PowerPoint

The History and Evolution of PowerPoint

04.20.20   •  #ppt #history #versions.

On April 20, 1987, the first version of PowerPoint was released. Because we love the software so much (and we know many of you readers do, too!), we wanted to celebrate PowerPoint’s 33rd birthday with a whole article dedicated to its origins, history, and use cases! 95% of presentations are created with PowerPoint, 30 Million PowerPoint presentations are given everyday, and 500 million people all over the world are using the software. So without further ado, let’s dive into the success story of PowerPoint - with the early beginnings and the development throughout the different versions (except for version 13, which was skipped due to triskaidekaphobia concerns ).

Timeline & Version History

5. july 1984: the idea was created.

Robert Gaskins was hired by Forethought Inc. as vice president of product development. His task was to create a new software for graphical personal computers like Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh. Already 1 month later, Gaskins came up with the idea of PowerPoint. Back then, the project description was labeled as "Presentation Graphics for Overhead Projection". For the next year they continued to work on the first specification of the software.

November 1984: Start of development

Development officially started under the name "Presenter". However, they started to work on the Macintosh version first. The first developer besides Gaskin was Thomas Rudkin, who joined after 6 months.

January 1987: Funding by Apple

To continue development, the team needed more money. Apple's Strategic Investment Group selected the company for its first investment. One month later, when they announced the software at the Personal Computer Forum in Phoenix, famous Apple CEO John Skully reportedly said "We see desktop presentation as potentially a bigger market for Apple than desktop publishing".

21. January 1987: The name PowerPoint was established

Originally, they chose to keep the name "Presenter" for the final software. However, to everyone's surprise, when they tried to register the trademark, their lawyers replied that the name was already used by another software product. The team had to find a new name quickly and thought about "SlideMaker" and "OverheadMaker". According to Gaskins, one night he came up with "Power point" randomly under the shower. Initially, nobody liked it, but when his colleague Glenn Hobin independently had the same idea (he saw a sign on an airport reading "POWER POINT"), they took it for an omen and stuck with the name. The reason why the name now is a single word with an upper-case P is that back then it was required in the naming of all Macintosh software applications. The common belief that PowerPoint got its name because it "empowers" people is therefore wrong.

20. April 1987: PowerPoint 1.0 (Macintosh)

The first 10.000 copies of the first version of PowerPoint for Macintosh shipped from manufacturing by Forethought Inc. The release was received quite well by the media, commenting it "People will buy a Macintosh just to get access to this product."

July 1987: Acquisition by Microsoft

In early 1987 Microsoft started an internal project to develop a software to "create presentations". Shortly after, they heard that a company called Forethought had nearly finished such a software. The successful release of PowerPoint 1.0 convinced Microsoft to buy the company entirely.

May 1988: PowerPoint 2.0 (Macintosh)

One year later, the second version of the software was introduces. It included color, more word processing features, find and replace, spell checking, color schemes for presentations, guide to color selection, ability to change color scheme retrospectively, shaded coloring for fills.

May 1990: First Windows version of PowerPoint

Almost 3 years later, the presentation software was finally released for Windows PCs. It was announced at the same time as Windows 3.0 and was using the same version number as the current Macintosh variant (2.0).

May & September 1990: PowerPoint 3.0

It was the first application designed exclusively for the new Windows 3.1 platform. New features were: full support for TrueType fonts (new in Windows 3.1), presentation templates, editing in outline view, new drawing, including freeform tool, flip, rotate, scale, align, and transforming imported pictures into their drawing primitives to make them editable, transitions between slides in slide show, incorporating sound and video.

February & October 1994: PowerPoint 4.0

The new version included among others: Word tables, rehearsal mode, hidden slides. Moreover, Microsoft first introduced a standard "Microsoft Office" look and feel (shared with Word and Excel), with status bar, toolbars and tooltips.

July 1995: PowerPoint 95 (new version naming)

To align PowerPoint with all other Office applications, Microsoft decided to skip versions 5 and 6 and instead call it PowerPoint 95.

October 2003: PowerPoint 2003

The 2003 version was the first to include the now called "Presenter View": tools visible to presenter during slide show (notes, thumbnails, time clock, re-order and edit slides). Furthermore, it included an option to "Package for CD" to write presentation and viewer app to a CD.

January 2007: PowerPoint 2007

It brought a new user interface (a changeable "ribbon" of tools across the top to replace menus and toolbars), SmartArt graphics, many graphical improvements in text and drawing, improved "Presenter View" and widescreen slide formats. Another major change was the transition from a binary file format, used from 1997 to 2003, to a new XML file format.

June 2010: PowerPoint 2010

This release added: sections within presentations, a reading view, save as video, insert video from web, embedding video and audio as well as enhanced editing for video and for pictures.

October 2012: PowerPoint for Web was released

The first time ever, the presentation software could be used in your web browser without any installation.

January 2013: PowerPoint 2013

Changes: online collaboration by multiple authors, user interface redesigned for multi-touch screens, improved audio, video, animations, and transitions, further changes to Presenter View. Clipart collections (and insertion tool) were removed, but were available online.

July 2013: First PowerPoint app for Android & iPhone

Finally the famous presentation software came on your mobile device with the first versions for Android and iOS. Giving presentations but as well basic editing of slides was already supported on the small screens. However, there wasn’t an iPad optimized version just yet.

September 2015: PowerPoint 2016

September 2018: PowerPoint 2019

New things in 2019: Morph transition, easily remove image backgrounds, inserting 3D models and SVG icons and a handy Zoom feature.

Are you interested in even more details on the story? You're lucky! Robert Gaskins gave an interview at the 25th anniversary of PowerPoint where he reveals even more on the history of the famous presentation software.

Modern use cases of PowerPoint

Most people use PowerPoint mainly for creating presentations, but did you know that there are many other ways of using the software? PowerPoint is not just for presenting plain slides to your audience - it can do much more - here are some interesting use cases you might not know about:

Games are a great way to lighten the mood during a presentation. Also, they engage the audience. Memory, Charades, or PowerPoint Karaoke - your options are endless! You can choose whatever suits your own presentation style and preference. If you don’t feel like thinking of games yourself, check out the best PowerPoint Games article , where you will get a lot of inspiration, creative game ideas and even a Memory template.

The times of boring, uninspired PowerPoint slides are long gone! Instead, we want to see interactive elements that engage the audience in new, exciting ways! Add Q&A sessions, get your audience’s feedback, share media and capture your audience with stories and unexpected elements! If you want to learn more about audience engagement and interaction, check out our blog post on 10 tools to boost Audience Engagement ! (Also, if you want to save time and energy, you can download SlideLizard , which allows you to create polls, do Q&A sessions, share media and slides and get audience feedback - all in one place!).

Quizzes are extremely popular, and you can create them easily with PowerPoint. We promise that your audience will love them! You can even take your quiz to the next level by matching the design of your quiz to popular quiz shows, like "Who wants to be a Millionaire" (actually, we designed a Who wants to be a Millionaire template with the original design and sound effects so you don’t have to do it yourself). Our advice for quizzes: Use a PowerPoint add-on that allows you to do live quizzes, like SlideLizard . That way you can easily let your audience vote via their smartphones or laptops.

Do you know the struggle of talking in front of a shy audience that doesn’t seem to open up? If you do, you’re definitely not alone: many presenters have to cope with this issue everyday. But there’s good news: By using some icebreaker questions at the beginning of your presentation, you can - well - break the ice. From "How are you feeling today" to "What would your superpower be" you could ask anything, really. Especially funny icebreaker questions (e.g. "Have you ever…?") are known to be very effective. You could even do more than one of these questions in the beginning (to be sure the ice is really broken). We've created a list of 20 great icebreaker questions , which you can use as inspiration.

Common struggles

PowerPoint is easy and intuitive to use - which is the reason why it has become the most used presentation software in the first place. However, there are several little struggles users sometimes have to deal with. They are all easy to solve though, and we will show you how.

Sometimes, the wrong language is set in the beginning, or you would simply like to add another language to your existing one. You can easily change that in the settings. In our blog post, you will get a detailed tutorial on how to install a new language pack and switch to your desired language .

Occasionally, PowerPoint files can get really big in file size. The reason for that are usually pictures or videos within the slides. To save a lot of storage space, you can compress your PowerPoint’s file size (without losing quality!). To learn how to do it, read this detailed step-by-step tutorial on reducing PPT file size .

This problem occurs often: You design a perfect presentation with custom fonts on your computer at home, but once you want to give that presentation on a different computer, all your beautiful custom fonts are gone and replaced with default fonts. That’s really annoying, but can be solved by embedding fonts into your .pptx file .

Templates are so useful, as they save so much time. The sad thing is that not that many people actually use them. We want to contribute to changing that by teaching you how to make your own custom design template for PowerPoint . And if you don’t feel like creating a template yourself, you can download one of ours for free:

• the wonderful Blue Alps template
• the simplistic Elegant Architecture template
• the fresh Caribbean template to get that summer holiday feeling

When was PowerPoint created?

The idea of PowerPoint came up in 1984. In the following years, development started under the name "Presenter". In 1987, the first version of PowerPoint for Macintosh was released. The first Windows release followed in 1990.

When did PowerPoint come out?

The first version of PowerPoint for Macintosh came out on April 20, 1987. The initial Windows version followed 3 years later, in May 1990.

Who created / invented / developed PowerPoint?

Robert Gaskins is one of the inventors of PowerPoint. He developed the first version with the help of his colleagues at Forethought Inc., Dennis Austin and Thomas Rudkin. Microsoft bought the company in 1987.

How old is PowerPoint?

The first version of PowerPoint was released on April 20, 1987, which means that PowerPoint celebrates its 33rd birthday in 2020. However, it was for Macintosh only, the Windows version was release in May 1990.

When did PowerPoint become popular?

According to Google Trends, PowerPoint had its peak in popularity in November 2009 (measured by number of searches). However, PowerPoint was already a popular presentation software in the 1990s.

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About the author.

Pia Lehner-Mittermaier

Pia works in Marketing as a graphic designer and writer at SlideLizard. She uses her vivid imagination and creativity to produce good content.

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This is a box plot with mean points connected. The user can also connect median points, data points or other percentiles, using controls on the Connect Lines tab of the Plot Details dialog.

A 3D OpenGL Surface Plot with multiple surfaces stacked in one graph layer. The graph has been customized by assigning a unique plot style and a custom Z offset to each surface. Some surfaces are also rendered as flat.

Density Dots plot of 2 million data points. Colormap represents data density computed using a fast algorithm.

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Over 100+ graph types are available from the Plot Menu.

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A multi-panel graph combining several layers of contour and line plots arranged flexibly . Note the inset layer on the bottom right panel. The top panel displays stacked lines by y offset allowing for easy comparison of multiple data plots.

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Grouped plots now support scatter plot with subgroup spacing. Scatter can then be combined with other plot types such as the column plot in this example.

Double-Y Trellis plot with two independent Y axes, each with its own scale settings.

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The other two datasets are plotted as grouped line plots for easy customization. Their corresponding error bars are drawn as transparent bands. Vertical and Horizontal drop lines are drawn from a point to the axes, with the x and y values labeled.

Skip symbols while maintaining overall data features

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• Add drop lines for 2D plots and 3D graphs
• Over 10 line connection styles such as linear, segment line, step horizontal/vertical, various spline, etc.
• 8 built-in line styles such as solid, dash, dot, etc. where dash can be defined

Fill Patterns

• Over 100 build-in fill pattern types, including standard USGS geology patterns
• Option to add user-defined fill patterns using emf files

• Add data labeling to plot or a single point
• Label as x, y coordinates, row indexing, column metadata or data/text from other columns
• Align Left, Center or Right option for multi-line labeling
• Auto-positioning of labels to avoid overlapping
• Leader line from label to data points
• Show error bar as bands with filled colors
• Support asymmetric error bar
• Allow skip point

Single Point and Multiple Plots Customization

• Customize a single point.
• Group multiple plots for easy customization
• Offset plots in X and Y directions

Origin supports offsetting plots in the X and Y directions with no change in data values. Offset options include auto, cumulative, incremental, constant, and individual. In this graph we stacked curves with a pattern such as 0 -100 so each data pair stayed together. The color and style were customized to use repeated patterns. For such graphs, you can also drag a single curve to reposition it for comparison with another curve. The Legend is arranged in two columns and placed beside each plot pair.

Plot Modifiers

• Symbol color, shape, size and interior
• Line color, style and thickness
• Fill color and pattern
• Centroid and subset
• Data label color
• Angle and Magnitude of 2D Vector
• Column and box chart width, box chart position
• For 3D colormap surface, set the color map by values of another matrix
• Use indexing, color map of arbitrary values, or specific RGB values to assign color
• Define the color, shape, style, pattern increment list
• Legend can be customized to indicate such information
• Save Match Modifier by column index, name, or other metadata properties in graph template

A color mapped bubble chart . This is essentially a scatter plot with modifiers for symbol size and color, set using other data columns. Notice the bubble legend on the top left of the graph. This unique feature in Origin allows for various configurations for this legend. The powerful Color Chooser dialog is displayed on the right side. This dialog has several options including the ability to load a list of pre-defined colors.

This graph displays the relative quantities of size fractions of unconsolidated sedimentary materials with depth below the ground surface. Hatch (Fill) pattern selection has been enhanced for Origin 2017, including the addition of entirely new "Geology" fill patterns.

The graph is an example of a sunburst chart . A sunburst has multiple levels (represented by different rings), across which you can see how a category is split into contributing sub-categories. The color-indexing of the rings is done by values from the same "Browser" column in the worksheet.

A surface plot created from XYZ data where the color map was based on a 4th data column. A custom XY boundary has also been applied to the plot.

A Double-Y plot allowing for easy comparison of two datasets. Note that the Y axes ticks and labels have the same color as the data plot they represent. Other features include scientific notation for labels in the right Y axis, special tick labels at user-specified axis positions, and an axis break in the X axis. Origin supports multiple special ticks and axes breaks.

In addition to support for multiple axis scale types such as linear, log10, and reciprocal, Origin supports creating scales using a custom formula. In this graph , the X axis scale was set using sqrt(x).

Positive and Negative Symmetrical Log Scale

This graph displays the NASDAQ composite index over a period of several years. Notice the X axis where in addition to the yearly tick marks, special ticks and labels have been placed to mark significant events during that time period. Each special tick label can be individually formatted.

• Support multiple scale types such as linear, log10, Probability, Reciprocal ect
• Positive and negative symmetrical log scale
• User-defined axis scale type using formulas
• Discrete scale type for skipping rows without data, therefore exclude weekends and holidays for financial data.
• Major and minor ticks can be set by increment, counts, from a dataset, from column label row, or at user-specified positions
• Multiple Special Ticks with detailed tick and label formatting for each tick
• Leader lines for special ticks

Axis Lines and Grid Lines

• Independent control axis line, major ticks and minor ticks.
• Additional axis line at any position to be used as baseline for column/bar plots and drop lines
• Option to show axis and grids on top of data

Reference Lines

• Multiple reference lines and shading between, in 2D graphs
• Use statistical functions on plotted data, such as mean and standard deviation
• Show linear fit curve, confidence band, etc.
• Functions can be combined, such as mean+1.5*sd
• Use custom equations or expressions to add lines based on axis scale values
• Lines are saved in graph template for repeated use
• Lines update when data changes

Tick Labels

• Many tick label types from numeric, text, date, time, month, week, etc. with varioues display control.
• Tick labels can be from a column of values or a combination of column labels
• Wrap, rotate tick labels, position it at tick, next to tick or between two ticks.
• Tick labels displayed as table, with flexible customization of table grid lines, text orientation and positioning
• Flexible Minor Tick Label Display Format, separate from major ticks
• Remove exponential notation common to all tick labels and add to end of axis
• Read title from metadata from plot
• Customize axis title, including units for different conventions, e.g. curly brackets, square brackets, etc.
• Supported axis break customization includes: break styles, define gap, break region, break position along axis, scale type and increment before/after break
• Multiple Axis Breaks with customization of scale and tick labels of each individual segment, and control of break gaps

Multiple Axes Customization

• Customize one axis at a time or multiple axes together
• Copy axis format to other layer or graphs

Further Axes Customization

• Isometric layer scaling to link axes length to scale by X/Y ratio (2D plots) and X/Y/Z ratio (3D plots)
• Set Y axis color to follow plot color in multi-Y plots
• Exchange X and Y axes

Engine torque speed map where performance is plotted as a contour plot with custom boundary defined by maximum torque line. Reference lines for various horse power values have been added using the expression: Torque=HP*5252/RPM

An Arrhenius plot of ln(k) versus 1/T. A linear regression on the Arrhenius plot will solve the intercept which corresponds to ln(A), and the slope which corresponds to -Ea/R. A linked secondary top axis is added to display temperature in degrees Celsius, using the formula: Xtop = (1 / Xbottom) – 273.15. The axis type is also set to non-linear with a custom formula.

In this grouped box chart , labels representing the group variables have been created using a table format . Options for customizing the table include placement above and below the layer, merging labels between subgroups, flexible border options, ticks, and fill colors.

By setting Axis type to Discrete, weekends and holidays are excluded in this Open-High-Low-Close-Volume Stock Chart. Minor tick labels are customized to show the first letter of the weekday while major tick labels show the date as M/d/yyyy.

Graph Legends and Color Scales

Update/Reconstruct Legend

Origin grants you the possibility to simply update or construct the legend for data plots. Some commonly used options are:

• Reverse the order of the legend(s).
• Create one combined legend or separated legends for data plots in multi-layer graph.
• Hide or show plot from legend(s)
• Add custom symbol and/or line
• Customize properties such as size and thickness

Create one combined legend or separate legends for each set of data plots in a multi-layer graph. In addition, there are shortcut menu options to rearrange, reorder, or further customize the data plot legend.

Special Legends and Scales

Origin also has several special legends used with certain graph types. These legends and scales can be customized and updated similarly with a dialog

• Categorical Values
• Legend for Box Chart Components
• Point by Point Legend
• Color Scale
• Linear or Nested Bubble Scale

This box chart includes a special box chart legend. This legend is auto-generated for box charts. Each legend entry refers to a box plot component: the box, whiskers, median or mean lines, percentiles, etc. In addition, the Legend Properties dialog lets you add custom entries to your legend for symbols and lines, by building the desired syntax using a dialog.

The Piper diagram (or Trilinear diagram) is used to plot chemistry of water samples for hydro-geological studies. Scatter point shape and color change for each sample. Sample ID is displayed next to each point and its color is matched to the sample point. A colorblind-safe color list is used (Origin includes two such built-in color lists). A bubble scale relates bubble size to total dissolved solids. A point-by-point legend identifies each sample point.

A scatter plot with modifiers for color and size, set using other data columns. Note the nested bubble scale legend at bottom left. The map of the continental USA was added to the graph using the Insert: Continental USA Map menu entry (The menu entry will be shown when the scale matches the range of the map's latitude and longitude)

Directly type or copy-paste LaTeX expression into worksheet label rows such as Long Name or Comments using the \q(LaTeX-expression) syntax. Mini Toolbar button also available to bring up dialog with preview, to enter expression and insert into cell. When graph is created from such worksheet, equation is automatically rendered in graph axes titles and legends

Origin also provides a simplified Symbol Map dialog, with multiple tabs with commonly used and popular symbols, to enable users to find and insert symbols quickly when editing text labels.

Insert worksheet in graphs or layout pages and further customize object to create custom reports

Graph Annotations

• Add text, including plain text or text from data or metadata with rich text format.
• Add page/layer title
• Add graphic objects such as line, polyline, freehand draw tool, curve, arrows, distance annotation, angle annotation, circle, oval, square, rectangle, polygon, freehand region, etc.
• Add special characters, superscript, and subscript notation
• Add equations to your graph (built-in LaTeX support)
• Add an image from external file or web
• Add and format tables
• Add XY Scaler, asterisk brackets with different shapes, date/time stamp, and project path

Insert Image to Graphs

• Insert image from web or disk, support file types including SVG, TIFF, PNG and JPEG etc.
• Insert as floating image or as layer background
• Crop, clip or rotate inserted images
• Set inserted image scale or co-ordinates and then match graph when inserting

Insert Worksheets in Graph

• Nice sheet object with hidden column & row header and no margin
• Mini Toolbar to customize band colors, grid style, frame & grid color and thickness
• Increasing/decreasing font size will automatically adjust table cell size
• Grid and frame customization kept when retrieving other updates from worksheet
• Align objects with each other or with graph layers
• Distribute the objects evenly
• Group multiple objects
• CTRL+Drag to create duplicate object(s) at new location
• Edit Points to change Polyline, Curve, Polygon, and Region shapes

Drag and drop a map image to Origin, set co-ordinate and then insert it in graph as background

Origin supports plotting 3D graphs from XYZ data, XYY data, matrix data and virtual matrix. The OpenGL graphic technology brought unltrafast performance and more flexibility to customize your 3D graphs.

• Rotate, resize and skew
• Projection and dropline
• Flatten or and shift in Z direction
• Transparency
• Turn on/off planes, and show 4th plane
• Scatter plots with X, Y, Z error bars
• Plot from virtual matrix
• 3D Basic and Stacked Bar Plot with error and labels

This graph displays the topology of Mount St. Helens before and after the volcanic eruption in 1980. The data are plotted as two color map surface plots in the same OpenGL graph layer, with the top surface offset along the Z axis. A light source has been added to illuminate the surface. Isometric scaling has been applied so that the X, Y and Z axis lengths reflect true relative distances.

This graph displays the population of different counties by fetching map data from a new WMS server and then plotting 3D bars on top of the map plane. The Maps Online app offers a few built-in map data sources for users to choose from. You can also add your own map source. With Origin, it is very easy to place 3D bars on a map using the Layer Contents dialog.

This graph displays a 3D color map surface plot of Mount Everest region. The surface is overlaid by a 3D scatter plot with label to highlight the peaks. Origin supports free rotation of OpenGL graphs by simply holding down the R key and using the mouse. Additional options for rotating, resizing, stretching and skewing are available when the 3D graph layer is selected. The graph can be created from an online template, 3D Surface Map

This plot shows a 3D scatter plot with x, y, z errors, and projections on three axis planes. The 3D scatter symbol is colormapped to another data column (population density). Symbols and error bars in each projection can be customized independently.

This is a 3D Colormap Surface with Projection , made possible by plotting the data twice: once as a 3D surface plot and a second time as a flat surface . The flat surface can be offset arbitrarily in the Z direction. The additional red and yellow curves in the XZ plane were added using XYZ datasets having a constant Y value.

The Polynomial Surface Fit app is a great tool for fitting XYZ data with polynomial equations of specified/maximum degree in X and Y, and ranking equations to determine best fit. Using a transparent surface and drop lines to surface instead of the bottom plane, you can show distances between the points and the surface.

User-friendly Interface

Enable users to quickly turn Origin interface to dark style to provide a comfortable viewing for low-light environments.

• Multiple built-in dark themes
• Dark Mode toolbar to toggle dark mode
• Toggle dark mode on individual windows
• Customizable background color for graphs
• Customizable color mapping for color reversal
• Copy or export graph with or without dark mode effect

Mini Toolbar

Origin supports Mini Toolbar for quick and easy operations on graphs and worksheet/matrix. These toolbars are sensitive to the type of object selected. The buttons in the pop up provide access to all of the common customization options, so you can perform quick changes without opening complex dialogs.

Float Windows outside of Origin Interface

Float one or more child windows outside of main interface to take full advantage of desktop space and multiple monitors:

Redo and Undo

Redo and Undo to make your work experience smoother

Impressive Import Speed for Large Data

Importing large text files is easy and fast in Origin.

Import speed in Origin is a factor of 10 or more compared to Excel 2016, and compared to older versions of Origin. The gain in speed has been achieved by making full use of the processor's multi-core architecture.

Importing Files

Origin supports more than 30 data formats including: ASCII, CSV, EXCEL, Binary, PCLAMP, CDF, DCF, HPF, EPA, EDF, BDF, REC, HYP, DAT, MDF, DAT, RAW, H5, HE5, HDF5, DAT, PXP, IBW, , DX, DX1, JDX, JCM, QDA, MAT, MTW, MPJ, mzData, mzXML, mzML, imzML, NC, DAT, TDM, TDMS, ABF, DAT, AB, SPE, PZFX, XML, JNB, SIE, WAV, SAV, SPC, CGM, BRUKER OPUS, ISF, and SAS7BDAT

• ASCII import options include specifying delimiter. parsing header lines to extract metadata, partial import, support for date and time data
• Many import formats support drag-and-drop import, re-import of file to update data, and option to execute script at the end of import for post processing
• Save import settings as a theme file or save theme in worksheet for future import
• Customize the Import menu to only display formats of interest to you

You can drag-and-drop data files onto the Origin interface to import them. Drag-and-drop is supported for most common file types, and can be further customized for additional or custom file types.

Data Connectors

• Connect to a web file, or a file on your local PC or network, or cloud, or database
• File types supported: CSV, Excel, ASCII/Binary (using Import Wizard filters), HTML, JSON, MATLAB, Origin Projects ect
• Select data to be imported, such as specific node in XML, table in HTML, or Sheet in Origin Project.
• Data Navigator panel in worksheet to view and change subset of data to be imported
• Connection and data selection information is saved in worksheet/workbook
• Add connectors of same type to multiple worksheets in a workbook, and different connector types to multiple workbooks
• When saving the Origin project, you can opt to leave out the imported data associated with all connectors, or specific connectors. This can help reduce project file size. All calculated results and graphs from results will not be cleared.
• Re-import data from the source file any time. Make changes to source or to data selection at any time.
• Database Connector dialog enables various options for connecting database
• More data connectors available for download from the App Center or from Data menu.

Working with Excel

You can copy and paste data from Excel to Origin with full precision.

You can import XLS, XLSX & XLSM files into Origin. Starting with Origin 2017, you no longer need to have MS Excel installed to import these file types. Origin provides the following options for Excel file import:

• Specify rows for column name, units, comments and other metadata, and apply same settings for multiple sheets
• Importing specified columns/rows
• Keep cell formatting (except cell formulas)
• Re-import data quickly when external file has been updated

You can import Excel files or open them directly in Origin (by launching an OLE instance of Excel). We recommend importing your Excel data, so that you have full access to Origin's powerful graphing and analysis environment.

Database Import

Origin supports importing data from a database using Database Connector . Options include:

• Connect to databases including Access, SQLite, SQL, Oracle, and MySQL
• Save connection information to file
• Save query in the Origin worksheet or as external file for quick re-import or repeat use
• Use LabTalk variables in SQL script to further customize the query

Origin supports importing from a database , and then saving the query in the worksheet for easy editing and re-importing. The Database Connector provides both ADO and ODBC support for typical databases such as Oracle®, Microsoft SQL Server® and MySQL®

The Digitizer tool in Origin allows you to perform manual or semi-automated digitizing of graph images. Features include:

• Work with image file or image in clipboard
• Rotation to correct for alignment of axes
• Support for Cartesian, Polar and Ternary coordinates
• Linear and Log axes scales
• Pick points manually or auto trace specific lines, by area, or by specifying vertical/horizontal grids
• Digitize multiple data into separate datasets
• Edit/delete or reorder digitized points
• Graph and view digitized data

The Digitizer tool in Origin lets you generate data from images of graphs. Cartesian, ternary, and polar coordinates are supported. Digitizing methods include manual or semi-automated operations. Multiple curves can be digitized, and points can be reordered and visualized in the result graphing and data worksheet.

Zoom and Pan

• Magnify a region of the graph
• Easily zoom and pan to desired X/Y scale
• Drag and change axis scale on graphs
• Zoom in region of interest and display details in second layer
• Enlarge a region of overlapped multi-layer graphs in a second graph (Use Scale-In tool while holding CTRL key)

Alter or Remove Data Points

• Use masking tools to exclude data points from analysis or hide points from display
• Alter or remove data points

In a Zoom graph, a zoomed portion of a larger graph is added to explore a region of interest. Moving the cyan rectangle updates that portion of the graph shown by the inset.

Select the axis and drag the red point to change axis scale on graphs.

Or you can also press the Z or X keys and scroll the mouse wheel to quickly and interactively zoom and pan data in graph layers.

Press Ctrl+R to rescale graph axes to show all data.

Examine Data Points and Related Data

• Use Data Reader to read data plot's coordinates, row index or corresponding info. in other columns.
• Use Screen Reader to read coordinates of of any position in graph.
• Use the Vertical Cursor Gadget for exploring data in stacked graphs
• Data Highlighting
• Data Point Tooltip
• Plot Highlighting
• Highlight column in worksheet when highlighting data plot in graph
• Conditional Formatting for Worksheets

ROI-based Data Extraction from Graph

It is now possible to select data interactively on graph and then extract to a separate worksheet:

Example of extracting data using multiple ROIs on graph

Browser Graph for Multichannel Data Exploration

• Allow quick selection of columns to plot, such as by picking every Nth column
• Allow changing all plots to data from different sheet.
• Choice of line, histogram, stacked lines or stacked graphs
• Interactively turn selected plots on/off to explore
• Sort plots using any metadata value
• Flip through plots in browser graph
• Options to add data from current sheet or other sheets or books
• Turn Browser Panel on for regular graphs
• Spawn new graph with selected plots

Data Slicer for Graphs

Highlight a particular data plot in a graph. Also works with complex graph types such as Parallel plot.

The Data Reader tool and the Data Info Window in Origin allow you to explore your data graphically. You can customize the display to include information from other columns of the worksheet, including images embedded in worksheet cells.

Use Vertical Cursor for exploring data in stacked graphs in multiple graph windows simultaneously. You can find information of one cursor or compare two cursors such as the distance

Change Parameter and Recalculate

• Set up your graphs and analysis for current data
• Change analysis parameters by re-opening dialog and changing settings any time, without having to repeat the analysis .
• Change input data such as by importing another file, to automatically trigger recalculation of results and updating of graphs and reports.

Data Analysis and Statistics

Origin and OriginPro provide a rich set of tools for performing exploratory and advanced analysis of your data. Please view the following sections for details.

Origin provides several gadgets to perform exploratory analysis by interacting with data plotted in a graph.

• Select data range interactively using a Region-of-Interest (ROI) box
• View immediate results as you move or resize the ROI.
• Generate detailed reports from the analysis
• Options for customizing visual results and report settings
• Save settings as a Theme for repeat use
• Repeat the analysis on all data plots in graph layer or page

Origin provides a selection of Gadgets to perform exploratory analysis of data from a graph. A region of interest (ROI) control allows you to interactively specify the subset of data to be analyzed. Results from the analysis are dynamically updated on top of the ROI as it is resized or moved. This image shows peak fitting being performed using the Quick Fit gadget.

• Same or different gadgets can be applied multiple times in same graph
• Hide ROI box temporarily for printing and export

Two statistics gadgets are applied to this graph to report statistics in two regions of interest (ROI). Mean and 1st SD lines and corresponding values are are displayed in each ROI. The Y axis is moved to separate the two regions. Yellow ROI boxes are hidden so that they do not show in printouts. The "S" button on upper-right corner re-displays the ROI boxes when clicked.

Gadgets in Origin and OriginPro:

• Statistics Gadget
• Vertical Cursor Gadget
• Differentiate Gadget
• Digitizer Gadget
• Integration Gadget
• Interpolate Gadget
• Intersect Gadget
• Quick Fit Gadget
• Quick Peaks Gadget
• Quick Sigmoidal Fit Gadget
• Cluster Gadget PRO
• 2D Integration Gadget PRO
• Rise Time Gadget PRO

Use the Quick Peak Gadget to interactively perform peak finding, baseline subtraction, and peak integration of data from a graph.

The Quick Fit Gadget lets you perform linear, polynomial, or nonlinear curve fitting on data plots in a graph. Notice the label on top of the ROI displaying the slope and Pearson's r from a linear fit . The label updates dynamically as the ROI is moved or resized.

The Cluster Gadget available in OriginPro lets you interact with data in a graph within a region of interest (ROI). The ROI can be rectangular, elliptical, polygon or arbitrary hand-draw shape. The tool provides statistics on data inside and outside the ROI, and also lets you copy, clear, mask or delete selected data.

Origin provides various tools for linear, polynomial and nonlinear curve and surface fitting. Fitting routines use state-of-the-art algorithms. The sections below provide a summary of key features.

Options and Controls

• Flexible data input. Select from worksheet or graph.
• Specify sub range of data graphically or by numeric begin and end values
• Fit multiple datasets independently, globally, or in concatenate/replicate mode
• Global fitting allows sharing of parameters across datasets
• Select from close to 200 built-in fitting functions arranged in categories
• Create your own fitting function using our Fitting Function Builder, including using Python Script
• Fit with explicit and implicit functions
• Specify bounds and constraints to limit parameter space
• Control the fitting process by performing step-wise iterations
• Detailed report sheet including fit statistics, parameters and ANOVA tables, and residuals analysis
• Calculate Y/X values for new set of X/Y values based on the fit curve
• Iteration Algorithms for nonlinear regression: Levenberg-Marquardt and Orthogonal Distance Regression (Pro)

Graph displaying result of linear regression . Options for linear regression include fixing intercept or slope, finding new X/Y values from known Y/X values using the fit line, goodness of fit results including significance of slope, and fitting with both X and Y errors .

Graph displaying result of polynomial regression . Options include fitting up to 9th order polynomial, fixing intercept, finding new X/Y values from known Y/X values using the fit line, and fitting with Y errors.

Origin supports Global Fitting with Parameter Sharing , where you can simultaneously fit multiple datasets with the same function and optionally share one or more fitting parameters across all datasets. The report sheet will provide a summary table with all parameter values and errors, and a single set of fit statistics from the global fit.

OriginPro supports fitting with implicit functions using the Orthogonal Distance Regression algorithm which minimizes the orthogonal distance from data to the fit curve. Errors and weighting for both X and Y data are supported. Implicit functions can have two or more variables.

Result of an Apparent Linear Fit on data plotted with logarithmic Y axis scale.

Perform Weighted Fitting using either Levenberg-Marquardt or Orthogonal Distance Regression algorithms. The latter supports weights for both X and Y data. Select from over 12 weighting methods including instrumental, statistical, direct, arbitrary dataset, and variance.

When working with replicate data, Origin can perform a Concatenated Fit where the replicates are combined internally to a single dataset. The graph included in the report sheet can either represent the data in replicate form, or as mean values with SD or SE error bars. A Quick Sigmoidal Fit Gadget is also available.

Comparing Models and Datasets PRO

OriginPro provides the following tools for fit comparison:

• Compare two fitting models with one dataset
• Compare one fitting model with two datasets
• Fit one dataset with multiple models, and rank fit results using F-test or Akaike (AIC)/Bayesian(BIC) Information Criterion

The Rank Models tool in OriginPro can fit and rank multiple functions to a dataset. The fit results can be ranked by either Akaike (AIC) or Bayesian (BIC) Information Criterion, to determine the best fitting model for your data.

Surface Fitting PRO

Perform 3D surface fitting on XYZ worksheet data or matrix data

• Over 20 built-in fitting functions
• Create your own fitting function
• Fit multiple peaks
• Automatically find peaks using several methods
• Calculate Z values for new set of XY values based on the fit surface

Use OriginPro to perform nonlinear surface fitting of data organized in XYZ worksheet columns , a matrix , or a virtual matrix . Select from over 20 surface functions or create your own function. For peak functions, find peaks using local maximum, partial derivative, or contour consolidation.

Results from fitting a 2D Gaussian function to four peaks, using the Surface Fitting tool in OriginPro. The raw data is plotted as a color-filled contour plot, and the fit results are plotted as contour lines.

Implicit Fitting PRO

Do you need to fit an implicit function to your data? Origin's NLFit tool supports implicit fitting using the Orthogonal Distance Regression (ODR) algorithm, including fitting with X and/or Y error data.

Implicit Fitting uses the Orthogonal Distance Regression algorithm to find optimal values for the fit parameters. Errors or weights are supported for both X and Y data.

Origin provides several features for peak analysis, from baseline correction to peak finding, peak integration, peak deconvolution and fitting. The following sections list the key features for peak analysis.

Baseline Detection

• Automatic and manual options to find baseline, or use existing dataset
• Methods include 2nd Derivative, XPS, and Asymmetric Least Squares
• Interactively add/modify anchor points
• Interpolate or fit baseline points with nonlinear functions
• Subtract baseline, or include baseline fitting as part of final peak fit

Peak Integration

• Automatic or user-specified integration window width
• Graphically adjust width for individual peaks
• Integrate from baseline or from y=0
• Report quantities including height, area, percent area, centroid, FWHM, and left/right half widths

This is a preview graph for performing peak integration using the Peak Analyzer tool. The integration range can be applied for all peaks, or modified individually and interactively for each peak.

Peak Fitting PRO

• Select from over 25 built-in peak functions, or create your own peak function
• Fit all peaks with same function form, or assign different functions to specific peaks
• Peak deconvolution to resolve overlapping or hidden peaks
• Fix peak centers or allow them to vary by a set percentage or within a set range of values
• Specify bounds and constraints on peak parameters
• Share parameters across peaks
• Full control of fitting process including step-by-step iterations
• Detailed report including fit statistics, residuals, and graph of individual and cumulative fit lines
• Over 25 peak properties for reporting, including peak area by percentage, variance, skewness and peak excess
• Fit summary graph with customizable peak properties table

Peak Finding

• Automatic and manual options to find and add peaks
• Methods include Local Maximum, Window Search, Residuals, and 1st/2nd Derivative to locate hidden peaks
• Load peaks from predefined data list or theme
• Smooth data or derivative to locate peaks in noisy data
• Filter peaks by threshold or number of peaks
• Find positive and/or negative peaks
• Add, modify or remove peaks interactively
• Label peaks using x, y, or row index of peak location in data

Batch Peak Analysis

• Use integration and peak gadgets to analyze multiple curves in a graph within or across layers
• Use a predefined peak analysis theme to analyze multiple datasets or files
• Output a custom report table with peak parameters from each dataset or file

The Quick Peaks Gadget provides a quick and interactive way to perform peak analysis from a graph, using a region of interest (ROI) control. Batch operations such as integration of multiple curves over a desired range are also possible from this gadget.

The Peak Analyzer tool in Origin supports baseline detection, peak picking, and peak integration. In OriginPro, this tool also supports fitting multiple peaks . Peak detection methods include 2nd derivative search to detect overlapping or hidden peaks. The interface guides you step-by-step, allowing you to customize settings at each stage, and then save the settings as a theme for repeat use on similar data.

Origin provides a wide array of tools for statistical analysis.

In addition, Origin provides Stats Advisor App which helps user to interactively choose the appropriate statistical test, analysis tool or App.

The Stats Advisor App asks a series of questions and then suggests the appropriate tool or App to analyze your data.

Descriptive Statistics

The graph shows a Custom Report of numerical and graphical results from multiple statistical tools, created from Origin's flexible worksheet. Once created, such reports can be automatically generated, greatly simplifying your statistical analysis tasks.

Origin provides several tools for summarizing your continuous and discrete data:

• Statistics on columns or rows
• Cross tabulation PRO
• 1D and 2D frequency counts
• Discrete frequency
• Normality test
• Distribution Fit including normal, Weibull, exponential and gamma PRO
• Correlation coefficient PRO and Partial correlation coefficient PRO to detect relationship between datasets
• Outlier tests: Grubbs and Dixon's Q tests

Parametric Tests

• One-Sample t-Test
• Two-Sample t-Test and Welch's test
• Pair-Sample t-Test
• Two-Sample t-Test on Rows PRO
• Pair-Sample t-Test on Rows PRO
• One-Sample Test for Variance PRO
• Two-Sample Test for Variance PRO
• One-Sample Proportion Test PRO
• Two-Sample Proportion Test PRO

Non-parametric Tests

• One-Sample Wilcoxon Signed Rank PRO
• Paired-Sample Sign PRO
• Paired-Sample Wilcoxon Signed Rank PRO
• Two-Sample Kolmogorov-Smirnov PRO
• Mann-Whitney PRO
• Kruskal-Wallis ANOVA PRO
• Mood’s Median PRO
• Friedman ANOVA PRO

An Origin Analysis Report Sheet , this one created by the One-way Repeated Measures ANOVA tool. The image shows two of the embedded graphs opened for further editing. Edit an embedded graph by double-clicking on the thumbnail image in the report. Once customizations are made, put the graphs back into the report and see your modifications.

Origin provides 5 ANOVA tools to examine the differences between group means

• One-way and Two-way ANOVA
• Three-way ANOVA PRO
• One- and Two-way Repeated-Measures ANOVA PRO
• Tukey and Bonferroni
• Dunn-Sidak and Fisher LSD
• Scheffe and Holm-Bonferroni

Multivariate Analysis

Five commonly used multivariate tools are available:

• Principal Component Analysis PRO
• K-Means Cluster PRO
• Hierarchical Cluster PRO
• Discriminant Analysis PRO
• Partial Least Square PRO

Dendrogram of spectra classification from Hierarchical Cluster Analysis of spectra

A Loading and Score plot created by the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) tool in OriginPro.

A Canonical Score Plot created by the Discriminant Analysis tool in OriginPro. This plot can be used to classify observations across groups.

Quality Control and Improvement

OriginPro provides the following key tools for quality control and Improvement:

• Statistical Process Control (SPC) PRO
• Measurement System Analysis (MSA) PRO
• Tolerance Intervals PRO
• Design of Experiments (DOE) PRO

Time Series Exploration and Analysis

Origin supports a variety of graph types to visualize time series data, and a selection of tools for processing and analyzing such data.

• Time Series Processing: Unstack, Filtering, Moving average
• Time Series Analysis: Trend, Decomposition, Correlation, Smooth, ARIMA Model, Stationary Test ect

Additional Analyses

Other statistical tools available in OriginPro include:

• Survival and Reliability Analysis
• Machine Learning Tools

Statistical Process Control App

Easily explore time series data using the Time Series Explorer Graph

Origin provides a wide array of tools for signal processing.

• Fast Fourier Transform and Inverse Fast Fourier Transform (FFT/IFFT)
• Short-time Fourier Transform (STFT) PRO
• 2D FFT/2D IFFT PRO
• Hilbert Transform PRO

The Short-Time Fourier Transform (STFT) tool in OriginPro performs time-frequency analysis of non-stationary signals. A Time-Frequency Analysis App using Continuous Wavelet Transform is also available.

• Savitzky-Golay
• Adjacent-Averaging
• Percentile Filter
• Lowess and Loess

The Smooth tool in Origin provides several methods to remove noise, including Adjacent Averaging, Savitzky-Golay, Percentile Filter, FFT Filter, LOWESS, LOESS, and Binomial Method. The graph shows results from LOWESS and LOESS smoothing, which are particularly useful for detecting trends in noisy data.

• 2D FFT Filter PRO

The IIR Filter tool in OriginPro can be used to design, analyze, and implement Infinite Impulse Response digital filters. Filter methods include Butterworth, Chebyshev Type I and II, and Elliptic filters. A preview panel is provided to enable real-time visualization of specified parameters and corresponding results.

Wavelet Analysis

• Continuous Wavelet Transform PRO
• Discrete Wavelet Transform (Decomposition) PRO
• Inverse Discrete Wavelet Transform (Reconstruction) PRO
• Multi-Scale Wavelet Decomposition PRO
• Smoothing PRO
• Noise Removal PRO
• 2D Wavelet Decomposition PRO
• 2D Wavelet Reconstruction PRO

A Time-Frequency Analysis App is also available from our File Exchange site.

Additional Tools

• Convolution
• Correlation
• Coherence PRO
• Envelope Curves PRO
• Decimation PRO

From simple column calculations to interpolation, calculus and integration, Origin provides a wide range of tools for mathematical analysis of worksheet and matrix data.

Column and Cell Calculations

• Simple column formula notation which is similar to Excel or Google Sheets
• Calculations can involve columns from other worksheets
• Over 500 functions in categories such as math, engineering, statistics, date-and-time, and string processing
• Before Formula Script to pre-process data prior to calculating results
• Auto-complete in cell or column formulas
• Works for both Data and User-defined Label Row Cells
• Stretch and extend formula vertically/horizontally
• Fixed cell referencing is supported
• Assign name to a range and then use in cell or column formula for calculations
• Use script-accessible functions and/or custom expressions
• Results update when source cells change, or with other changes such as data filter
• Normalization
• Average Multiple Curves in Worksheets or Graphs
• Math tool for simple column math

Use the Normalize tool to normalize data in a worksheet or a graph.

The F(x) Column Formula row in Origin worksheet lets you directly type expressions to calculate column values based on data in other columns and metadata elements. The expression can be further edited in the Set Values dialog which provides a lower panel to execute Before Formula scripts for pre-processing data. The Set Values dialog also provides a search button to quickly find and insert functions from over 500 built-in functions. User-defined functions can also be added for custom transforms.

Auto complete helps to quickly find and enter functions as well as name ranges to complete your formula.

Interpolation and Extrapolation

• 1D Interpolation/Extrapolation
• 1D Trace Interpolation
• Interpolate/Extrapolate Y at Specific X
• 2D Interpolation/Extrapolation
• 2D Trace Interpolation
• Interpolate/Extrapolate Z at Specific X,Y
• 3D Interpolation
• Interpolation methods: Linear, Spline, B-Spline, Akima, Kriging, Renka-Cline, Shepard, TPS , Triangle, Weighted Average

Use Origin's Interpolation Gadget to perform interpolation and extrapolation on one or more data plots in a graph. You can interactively select the data range using a region-of-interest (ROI) control. Interpolation methods include linear, spline and Akima spline.

Use the XYZ Trace Interpolation tool to perform interpolation on a set of XYZ data points, preserving the sequential aspect of the data.

Differentiation and Integration

• Numeric Differentiation
• Numeric Integration
• Polygon Area Calculation
• Surface Area Calculation PRO
• 2D Volume Integration PRO

Use the Integrate Gadget to perform integration of data curves in a graph. A region-of-interest (ROI) control is provided to interactively select the desired data range. Baseline methods include selecting an existing data plot as a baseline to determine the area between two curves, as displayed in this graph. Batch integration of multiple curves is also supported.

Use the 2D Surface Integration Gadget in OriginPro to calculate volume under a 3D surface plot, by interactively moving a region of interest (ROI). The volume, FWHM, minimum, maximum, and other quantities are dynamically updated as the ROI selector is moved or resized.

Origin provides multiple powerful data manipulation tools which can be used for pre-analysis data processing. The pre-analysis data processing can be carried out right after importing data into Origin, and help to get the data into a desired form for analysis in a quick and intuitive way.

Reorganization

• Sort data at column or worksheet level
• Stack and Unstack columns to transform data
• Split or Append Worksheets
• Transpose Worksheet including Metadata Rows

Origin provides several tools for reorganizing your data, such as stacking and unstacking columns, and splitting or appending worksheets. With the Stack Columns tool displayed here, you can specify a row label such as Long Name or Comments to act as group identifier. The tool also provides options for stacking into subgroups or stacking by rows.

Extraction and Reduction

• Filter your data using conditions on one or more worksheet columns. All associated graphs and analysis results will automatically update
• Use Pivot Table to reduce and summarize your data
• Reduce data using multiple methods such as Evenly Spaced X, Duplicate X, Reduce by Rows, or *Reduce by Group
• Fill data automatically in worksheet cells

The Data Filter feature in Origin lets you specify numeric, string, or date-time filters on one or more worksheet columns to quickly reduce data. Custom filter conditions are also supported. Hidden rows are excluded from graphing and analysis. All graphs and analysis results can automatically update when filter conditions are changed or when the filter is enabled/disabled.

RS and GIS Data Processing

• Calculate average from the NetCDF file during Importing
• Pick out a specific time period from a NetCDF file
• Shift or flip a NetCDF file during Importing
• Import GeoTIFF as image
• Import DEM data from GeoTIFF file for further analysis
• Import multiple GeoTIFF images as stacked matrices
• Apply color palettes to GeoTIFF image
• Fine tune gray scale display range of the image
• Export processed image or analysis result as GeoTIFF images

Data Processing and Analysis

• Extract pixel values from stacked matrices by selecting points or specifying coordinates
• Extract region-of-interest (including shapefile-based) from stacked matrices or image
• Finding mean, min, max and coordinates of min and max etc. on region-of-interest from matrix stack
• Matrix stats, subtraction, simple math, linear fit along time axis
• Resample or interpolation on stacked matrices

Visualization and Graphing

• Browser Graph for contour and image plots from matrix stack
• Set GeoTIFF as background of graph (Pie map, Bar map, Bubble)
• Plot raster data as Contour, Surface, etc.

Blog... NetCDF videos on YouTube

Add one or more ROIs on your imported GeoTIFF image, and extract to analyze further or create graphs such as 3D surface plot. Moving or resizing the ROI will automatically update the analysis results and graphs

Perform Theil–Sen regression on multiple years of GeoTIFF data and get the rate of change (slope value)

GeoTIFF image as background in graph, with pie map and shapefile overlaid

Origin provides many options for exporting and presentation, from sending graphs to PowerPoint, to creating movies

Resize Graph for Publishing

Journals typically require a specific width for the graph image, such as 86 mm for single column and 178 mm for double column. In addition, at the scaled size, they may require text labels to be above a particular font size, and lines to be above a certain thickness.

Once the graph has been scaled to the desired width then it can be exported in a vector or raster format for submission to the journal.

Specify desired width and units to match requirements of the journal. The page height will be proportionally scaled while maintaining aspect ratio. Relative dimensions of all objects in graph will be maintained.

Reduce white space in your graph page by either expanding all layers to occupy available space (Fit Layers to Page) or by reducing page size (Fit Page to Layers).

Exporting Graphs

• Export graphs and layout pages to over 15 file formats including SVG, EPS, PDF, EMF, TIFF, PNG, JPEG, and BMP
• Specify export settings such as export width, height and DPI
• Export User-defined Area of Graph Page
• Option to trim white space around the graph
• Save settings for repeat use

Pasting and Embedding

• Simply copy and paste graphs into other applications such as Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, etc.
• Paste as image, html, or as Origin Graph (OLE)
• If pasted as Origin graph, double-click to edit graph in Origin and make quick changes

Give your published graphs a consistent look using a Master Page or System Theme™ . In the GIF, we used the Master Page feature to add a company logo and date stamp of identical style and position in graphs

Send Graphs to PowerPoint or Word

• Send single or multiple graphs from anywhere in the project
• Send to existing file
• Attach to opened file
• Specify slide number to be repeated for each graph insertion
• Specify slide margins
• Place as picture or as graph object (OLE)
• Place graphs at bookmark locations by name

Copy and Paste HTML or EMF Tables

Copy formatted worksheet cells or tables from Origin's report sheets as HTML. Then paste to other applications such as Microsoft word and edit further. Worksheet cells can also be copied as EMF.

Perform a slide show right within Origin:

• All graphs from active folder in the project
• Slide order by graph name, slide index, or by last modified/created
• Option for continuous loop until Esc
• Switch to graph window from current slide

Send graphs to Microsoft® PowerPoint directly from Origin. You can send graphs individually by name, by Project Explorer folder, or send all graphs from the entire project. Options include specifying slide margins and using a pre-existing slide as a template, allowing you to add a common set of elements to your published slides.

A Send Graphs to Word App , available from the OriginLab File Exchange , exports your Origin graphs as embedded objects or pictures and inserts them into a Word document, with the option to insert them at specific bookmarked positions.

Creating Movies

• Specify width, height, alignment and frame rate
• Optionally compress file using available options on your computer
• Manually or programmatically add graphs as frames to a movie
• Export image stack in matrix as video

Use the Video Builder tool in Origin to create a video file from Origin graphs. Manually or programmatically add frames to the video from any graph in your project. This animation displays the evolution of data values mapped onto a 3D surface.

Creating Reports

Origin provides multiple ways to create nice reports. With any of the available methods, you can format the appearance of the report as you want, adding graphs, images and analysis results as links, thus creating a custom report.

Your custom report sheets can become templates for repeated tasks -- simply import new raw data and watch your custom report automatically update. When your report is ready, export it as a PDF file or as an image file by choosing a popular image format such as EPS and JPEG.

• Notes Window
• Layout / Graph Page

Use Origin Rich Text in a standalone Notes Window or Notes Sheet added to a workbook. Format text using various built-in, customizable styles, and add graph images and images from the project or from the web. Link to result values in report sheets to create a final report, all within Origin.

Origin provides multiple ways to handle repetitive graphing, importing and data analysis tasks. Batch operations can be performed directly from the GUI, without the need for any programming.

For Graphing

Copy and Paste Data Plot

• Copy and paste data plots from one graph layer to another with custom formatting

Save Graph Settings

• Save graph template
• Save graph theme
• Copy format and apply to other graphs

Batch Plotting

• Create desired graph from one column or from multiple columns in the worksheet
• Repeat graph for all columns, or for all worksheets with similar data structure
• Create new graphs with meaningful names
• Create graphs from multiple worksheet columns, specifying column name or position in the worksheet
• Save as Cloneable Template where column names/positions are saved
• Origin will mark all templates that are compatible with active sheet
• Create new graph with similar data structure with one click
• Template Library for organizing templates and filtering templates compatible with active sheet

One of the many time-saving features in Origin is batch plotting : Create a graph involving multiple columns from a worksheet/workbook, and then have Origin duplicate that graph for all other worksheets/workbooks in the project with the same data structure.

As an alternative to Graph Templates, Graph Themes provide a means to save graph customizations and apply them to different types of graphs across your projects.

The Template Library helps you organize and utilize Graph Templates you have created. Graph Templates are a great way to apply the customizations you have made to one graph, to additional graphs you make from similar data. Starting from Origin 2021b, Origin provides a set of extended graph templates in the template library.

Graph Template Library dialog shown in List View mode. It enable to select Graph Template to appear in Plot > My Template menu

For Importing

Set up desired graphs and analysis operations on data in the current workbook. Set the operations to automatically update. Then simply import multiple files, having Origin clone the current workbook for each file. All graphs and analysis results in the new books will be updated based on the data from each file.

Save Import Settings

• Save import settings as a dialog theme file
• Save import settings as a filter file
• Allow LabTalk script to execute after import
• Save import settings together with worksheet

Batch Import by Cloning Workbook

Origin provides a quick yet powerful way to allow users to perform batch graphing and analysis when importing multiple files.

• Import one file and set up your workbook with desired analysis and graphs all contained within the book
• During import, choose <clone> to use active book as temporary template for each new file

Clone an Origin Project

Clone an Origin project to easily replicate graphing and analysis tasks with new data.

• Set up a Master Origin project with your desired data, graphs and analysis, using multiple windows such as workbooks graphs, reports etc as needed
• Save your master project. Then from File menu, select Clone current Project...
• Import new data into the data sheets of the cloned project to update all of your graphs and analysis results in the project
• Optionally add a Data Connector link to the master project data sheets, in the cloned proje

For Analysis

Recalculation and Analysis Template

Origin supports automatic or manual recalculation of results from most analysis and data processing operations, which is the fundation of batch processing and automation.

• Update results when input data changes
• Modify dialog settings by Change parameters without need to start from scratch
• Output of one operation can be used as input for another to form a chain of operations
• Save dialog settings as a dialog theme file
• Last used theme is saved automatically for quick access
• Create Analysis template to automate analysis and custom report creation
• Use whole project as analysis template.

Repeating Operations on All Plots or Columns

• Perform an operation on one worksheet column or one data plot in a graph
• Simply repeat that operation for all other columns or data plots

Copying & Pasting Fitting Operations

• Perform curve fitting on one data plot in a graph
• Simply copy and paste the operation to other selected curves in the same graph or other graphs

Use Gadgets to Analyze Multiple Curves

• Plot all datasets in single or multiple layers in a graph
• Place gadget on one curve and customize settings
• Output results from the gadget for all curves in a layer or all curves in a graph page.

Batch Analysis

• set up an Analysis Template™ workbook by performing a desired set of operations on data
• Use the Batch Processing tool to process data from multiple files or worksheet columns
• Generate report table with desired metadata and parameters listed for each processed file or dataset
• Generate custom reports combining graphs and numeric results, using Origin's worksheet
• Optionally link an Analysis Template™ to a Microsoft Word Template and create polished multi-page reports
• Execute LabTalk script before or after each file, or at end of the batch process, for further customization
• Batch peak analysis with dialog theme

The Batch Processing tool in Origin lets you process multiple data files or datasets using an Analysis Template . The template can include a summary sheet for collecting relevant results for each file in a summary table. The analysis template can also be linked to a Microsoft Word template using bookmarks, to create custom multi-page Word or PDF reports for each data file.

Most analysis tools support recalculation of results upon changes to data. The green "lock" that you will see in result sheets and graph windows indicates that recalculation is set to "auto"; so, for instance, if you made changes to your input data, your linear regression analysis would update automatically. Left-click on the green lock to open the linear fit dialog, make adjustments to your analysis, then recalculate.

Once you perform an operation on a data plot or a worksheet column, Origin allows you to repeat the operation for all other plots in the graph, or all other columns in the worksheet.

You can use New Output for All Curves or New Output for All Layers to apply the same analysis on all plots.

The following are some of the key features related to data management in Origin

Origin Project (OPJ, OPJU) File

• Store data, metadata, notes, graphs, analysis operations and results in one document
• Arrange content in a flexible user-specified folder structure
• Add comments to sheet, window and folders
• Support internally saved Microsoft Excel files or links to external Excel files
• Include LabTalk Script, Origin C code files, and other third party files as attachments
• Search and find string or numeric values to quickly locate relevant windows within the project
• Highly portable: Colleagues who do not have Origin can view data and graphs from OPJ/OPJU files using the free Origin Viewer application (Windows or Mac)
• Save a subfolder as a new project file, append multiple project files from disk to current project
• Copy/Paste folders and workbooks across Origin sessions
• Individual windows, such as workbook, graph, matrix, notes can be saved to disk and opened in new project file
• OPJU File enable user to easily identify an Origin project visually in Windows Explorer

Navigating Your Data

• Project Explorer window with two panels to show folder and windows
• Autohide, dock or float Project Explorer in Origin workspace
• Detailed, list, small icon, large icon and extra large icon view mode for graph, workbook and matrix preview.
• Useful tooltips such as graph or workbook preview, and folder notes
• Easy way to locate and manage windows and folders
• Seesaw between folders to quickly switch folder
• Show graphs/worksheets from different folders
• Keep pinned windows when switching folders
• Favorites folder with shortcuts to collect key information such as all graphs ready for publication
• Show graphs as slideshow and adjust slideshow orders and skip or not in Project Explorer
• Create window shortcuts

Pinned windows stay on top and stay visible when switching to other folders in the Project Explorer

The Origin Project file (.OPJ) combines data, notes, graphs, and analysis results into one document with a user-defined folder structure.

The dockable Project Explorer window lets you organize the contents of your Origin project with a flexible user-defined folder structure. Simply drag-and-drop windows and subfolders to rearrange. Right-click on one or more graphs and choose Add Shortcut to Favorites and collect shortcuts in a Favorites folder, allowing for efficient presentation and/or export of select graphs. Choose Project Explorer's extra large icons view for graphs, for easy identification.

Origin Project files(OPJU) viewed in Windows Explorer. Middle panel shows large icons with image of last visited graph when project was saved. Right side panel shows larger image of graphs with vertical scroll bar to view all graphs contained in the project.

Workbooks and Worksheets

• Multi-sheet workbooks with capability to handle larger number of columns and rows compared to Excel
• Support for arbitrary number of metadata labels at the column level, and for hierarchical meta data structures at book and sheet levels
• Support freezing or splitting panes to lock rows or columns
• Sparklines for quick graphical view of a worksheet column of data
• Insert comments and notes to a cell
• Statistics, such as min, max, mean, etc. of selection cells, columns or range on Status bar
• Place graphs as floating or embedded objects in worksheets
• Create custom report sheets by arbitrarily arranging data, graphs, and images such as logos, on the page
• Wide array of data processing tools including data reduction, filtering, and pivot tables
• Data protection by disable editing
• Save import settings, format and operations in workbook and sheets
• Column List View for worksheet to display only a column list
• Treat missing values as blank in worksheet
• New Workbook dialog with many build-in templates, plus ability to add user-template and set as default template

The Origin Worksheet lets you store relevant metadata in Column Label Rows on top of the columns. Default rows include Long Name, Units, Comments, F(x) for Column Formula, and Sparklines that display a miniature graph of the data in the column. Users can further customize label rows for including other metadata elements. This image shows custom rows with rich text formatting for super-subscript, and images inserted from external files.

Freeze first n rows or columns. Hide sheets to reduce clutter.

Matrix books, Sheet and Objects

• Multi-sheet matrices for image or numeric data
• Multiple matrix objects in one sheet
• Thumbnails for quick image preview
• Data and Image Mode of Matrix
• Show XY values or row column index of Matrix
• Save import settings, format and operations in matrix books and sheets

Matrix book in Origin. Image Thumbnails Panel is turned on on the top to for quick preview of data. There are 3 matrix objects in current sheet, where the 3rd matrix is a subtraction of first two matrix objects. XY values of matrix show in column and row headers instead of column and row indices.

Password Protection

• Protect entire Origin Project (OPJ, OPJU) file with a password
• Optionally turn on Audit Log for project file saving, including separate password for log
• Providing option to turn on automatic addition of audit log for all newly created projects
• Password protection can be used to implement procedures for compliance with Title 21 CFR Part 11 regulations
• Protect workbook and worksheet with a password

Origin provides password protection of the entire project , or at the workbook/worksheet level. An audit log feature is also available, to maintain a record of date, time and user name for changes made to the project file. These protection features can facilitate compliance with CFR Title 21 Part 11 .

As your Origin use expands, you may want to programmatically access existing features in Origin, add your own custom routines and tools, or communicate with Origin from other applications. To facilitate such customizations, Origin provides the following options.

Origin provides an embedded Python environment so that you can run Python code in Origin.

• A originpro package with easy, high-level access to Origin objects and data from Python
• Intellisense support in Python Console
• Use Python functions in Set Column Values
• Define nonlinear fitting functions using Python
• Define Python functions in Fitting Function Builder and Peak Analyzer
• Support for Python code in the Import Wizard
• Support for Python script in Buttons
• Access to Python functions from LabTalk and Origin C
• Several sample projects and workbook templates using Python, plus extended collection of code samples

Set Column Values is one of several places where Python functions can be used to perform calculations and data transforms. The Python function, Before Formula Script, and the expression can all be saved together as a formula for future use.

LabTalk is a scripting language native to Origin. For simple operations such as manipulating data and automating tasks, LabTalk is a good place to start. You can access a rich set of script commands and functions, including a large collection of X-Functions, to create scripts for your specific needs. Your custom script code can be easily assigned to buttons on graphs or worksheets, new toolbar buttons or custom menu items.

The Classic Script Window in Origin can be used to execute Labtalk script. The same window can also be used to execute Python code.

LabTalk script can be stored in OGS files , and organized by "sections". Scripts can be executed in many ways in Origin, including from button objects added to graphs and worksheet windows.

Origin C is a programming language based on ANSI C, including additional support for C++ and C# features.

• Create and access properties of all Origin objects such as worksheets, matrices and graphs
• Automate your data analysis and graphing tasks
• Build HTML Dialog with Java Script
• Link to external dynamic link libraries (DLL)
• Call C or Fortran library routines, such as the NAG library functions included with Origin, or other public-domain libraries

Origin provides a state-of-the-art integrated development environment called Code Builder for managing your Origin C projects.

Code Builder is Origin’s integrated development environment for Origin C , LabTalk script, Python code, and App development . This image shows an Origin C workspace.

MATLAB Console

In addition to support for importing MATLAB (.mat) files, Origin also provides a MATLAB Console tool for interacting with MATLAB installed to the same computer. You can transfer data between the two applications, and also issue MATLAB commands from the tool.

The MATLAB Console tool in Origin lets you connect with the MATLAB workspace to transfer data between the two applications. Transfer selected variables from MATLAB to Origin to create your final publication-quality graphs.

R and Rserve Console

The R Console dialog in Origin allows you to access R if it is installed on the same computer. You can issue R commands from within the Origin, and transfer data between Origin and R. The Rserve Console dialog allows you to access a server installation of R in a similar manner.

The R and Rserve Consoles in Origin allow you to issue R commands within the Origin environment, and transfer data between the two applications either using a dialog interface, or by using commands. This example shows simulation of a random walk in a 2D lattice computed in R, with the route displayed as an Origin line plot. The step number has been used a modifier for the line color .

Mathematica Link

The Mathematica Link tool provides access to the Mathematica kernel from within Origin, for Mathematica installed to the same computer. The tool allows exchange of data, and to evaluate Mathematica expressions.

LabVIEW Sub VIs

Orign provides a collection of subVIs to facilitate communication with LabVIEW. These subVIs can be used for operations such as opening communication with Origin, exchanging data, and issuing commands to Origin from LabVIEW.

The Origin installation includes a collection of custom VIs for LabVIEW . The Vis are organized in three palettes, as shown in this image. The VIs provide various methods to connect, and send data and commands, to Origin from LabVIEW. The image also shows a LabVIEW VI that includes several of the VIs from these palettes.

Extend graphing and analysis functionality of Origin by installing free Apps from our File Exchange site. A selection of recently published Apps are displayed below.

To view the Apps in action, visit our YouTube channel and select the Apps in Origin playlist.

• Origin vs OriginPro
• 2024b (New)
• Sankey Diagrams
• 2D Density Scatter Plot
• Statistical Methods for Quality Improvement
• Time Series Data - Graphing and Analysis
• Geotiff in Origin
• Image Processing
• Handle Repetitive Tasks
• Brain Atlas Analyzer
• Student Version