Extracting data from plots, images, and maps with WebPlotDigitizer Posted on June 12, 2014 by Thomas It is hard to understand why in today’s all-interactive world, scientific data continues to be represented as still, lifeless images.
I have data that looks like this:
I want to use the first column as x axis labels, the second column as y axis labels and the third column as the z values. I want to display a surface in that manner. What is the best way to do this? I tried Excel but didn't really get anywhere. Does anyone have any suggestions for a tool to do this? Does anyone know how to do this in Excel?
Thanks
Flexo♦
David WilliamsDavid Williams
5 Answers
Jean-François Fabre♦
David WilliamsDavid Williams
You really can't display 3 columns of data as a 'surface'. Only having one column of 'Z' data will give you a line in 3 dimensional space, not a surface (Or in the case of your data, 3 separate lines). For Excel to be able to work with this data, it needs to be formatted as shown below:
Then, to get an actual surface, you would need to fill in all the missing cells with the appropriate Z-values. If you don't have those, then you are better off showing this as 3 separate 2D lines, because there isn't enough data for a surface.
The best 3D representation that Excel will give you of the above data is pretty confusing:
Representing this limited dataset as 2D data might be a better choice:
As a note for future reference, these types of questions usually do a little better on superuser.com.
StewbobStewbob
You can use r libraries for 3 D plotting.
Steps are:
First create a data frame using data.frame() command.
Create a 3D plot by using scatterplot3D library.
Or You can also rotate your chart using rgl library by plot3d() command.
Alternately you can use plot3d() command from rcmdr library.
In MATLAB, you can use surf(), mesh() or surfl() command as per your requirement.
You also can use Gnuplot which is also available from gretl. Put your x y z data on a text file an insert the following
Then you can set labels, etc. using
RobertRobert
Why not merge the rows that contain the same values? -
1000] -75.2 -- 79.21 -- 80.02
5000] ---------------------87.9---88.54----88.56
10000] -------------------90.11--90.97----90.87
Excel can use that pretty well..
Guest_UserGuest_User
protected by Community♦Sep 20 '14 at 0:11
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