All Together Now

In the lab we use IgorPro from Wavemetrics for analysis. Here is a useful procedure to plot all XY pairs in an experiment. I was plotting out some cell tracking data with a colleague and I knew that I had this useful function buried in an experiment somewhere. I eventually found it and thought I’d post it here. I’ll add it to the code section of the website soon. Looking at it, it doesn’t look like it was written by me. A search of IgorExchange didn’t reveal its author, so maybe it was me. Apologies if it wasn’t.

The point is: if you have a bunch of XY pairs and you just want to plot all of them in one window to look at them. If they are 2D waves or a small number of 1D waves, this is straightforward. If you have hundreds, you need a function!

An example would be fluorescence recordings versus time (where each time wave is unique to the fluorescence trace) or XY co-ordinates of a particle in space.

To use this procedure, you need an experiment with a logical naming system for 1D waves. something like X_ctrl1, X_ctrl2, X_ctrl3 etc. and Y_ctrl1, Y_ctrl2, Y_ctrl3 etc. Paste the following into the Procedure Window (command+m).

Function PlotAllWaves(theYList,theXlist)
	String theYList
	String theXList
 	display
	Variable i=0
	string aWaveName = ""
	string bWaveName = ""
	do
		aWaveName = StringFromList(i, theYList)
		bWavename = StringFromList(i, theXList)
		WAVE/Z aWave = $aWaveName
		WAVE/Z bWave = $bWaveName
		if (!WaveExists(aWave))
			break
		endif
 		appendtograph aWave vs bWave
		i += 1
	while(1)
End

After compiling you can call the function by typing in the Command Window:

PlotAllWaves(wavelist("x_*", ";", ""),wavelist("y_*", ";", ""))

You’ll need to change this for whatever convention you are using for your wave naming system. You will know how to do this if you have got this far!

This function is very useful for just eyeballing the data after you have imported it. The databrowser shows only one wave at a time, but it is preferable to look at all the waves to find errors, spot outliers or trends etc.

Edit 28/4/15: the logical naming system and the order in which the waves were added to the experiment are crucial for this to work. We’re now using two different versions of this code that either a) check that the waves are compatible or b) concatenate the waves into a 2D wave before plotting. This reduces errors in plotting.

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The post title is taken from All Together Now – The Beatles from the Yellow Submarine soundtrack.