IGOR Pro - 6.12

In the interest of full disclosure, I know who davidtalaga is, and I have worked with Wavemetrics in the past. I have no affiliation with them now.

That said, yes, Igor Pro is a marvelous piece of software. It is well conceived, well implemented and well supported. There is a 99.999% that you will never be limited by Igor capabilities whether you are a statistician, an optical engineer, a doctor, or any kind of scientist.

It is absolutely certain that you will not get better documentation and product support from anyone. Equally as certainly, you will not find a better price on any similar package. The R-foundation's R software is free of course, and it offers good documentation, but the learning curve is STEEP.

Igor Pro's learning curve is steep, too. So, be forewarned. However, if you do learn to use Igor, you will never need another software to analyze your data or to present your data. Igor does everything from data acquisition, processing of every sort (fitting, image analysis, curve fitting, etc., etc., etc.,) to making spectacularly beautiful graphics that are press ready.

I own one piece of software that I can't live without -- Igor Pro. I use Igor as a platform to acquire, display, and analyze electrophysiology data. One of its strongest points is the ability to write user-defined macros and functions that permit a good deal of automation of everyday chores. And, it's a snap to produce publication quality graphics that stand on there own or can be easily imported into drawing/graphic programs like Illustrator.

I second all of the praise heaped on this outstanding application. All of our lab's publication figures come straight out of this amazing analysis and graphing package. But that's not all. The graphs published in journals are usually black and white. But scientific talks benefit from color and Igor handles that just as gracefully. I do all of my talks in Apple's Keynote and the integration of Igor and Keynote is seamless. I use the powerful macro capabilities of Igor to convert a B&W graph into a color graph with just one click (changing axis, labels and symbols/lines automatically to my favorite colors) and place it in the clipboard ready to be placed into the Keynote presentation (with full transparency). There's nothing that even comes close to the power of Igor.

But the true asset of this package is the folks behind it. These guys know science and engineering and numeric analysis and programming. They go out of their way to help their customers and listen to their users. They are nothing short of amazing.

using IGOR on a daily basis as my primary tool for data analysis for over five years. It is an extremely mature product for scientific analysis and data presentation. For comparison the most similar package on Windows is Origin. Unlike Origin, IGOR is cross platform (Mac/PC), and its compatibility is flawless. Macs are increasingly rare in laboratories for several reasons, but primarily, in my opinion, due to diminishing support by National Instruments, makers of LabView et al. At home I prefer to use Mac OS X, and by using IGOR I am able to do so.

Igor for 5 years now. I'm convinced. I worked with Excel and Origin before. Igor is just great. Beginners can make plots of their data with ease and they do look good! The expert finds a real mighty programming environment that satisfies almost all needs of any complex data analysis, computation, visualisation. You'll love Igor after working with it for some weeks. btw: I use Igor exclusively as my calculator nowerdays. The commend line is just too powerful... :)