The figure above is a graphic description of the advance and retreat of Napoleon's Army into the Russian winter of 1812. The width of the column shows the number of troops, brown for the advance and black for the retreat. The death toll amongst the French is made terribly vivid by this figure. It was drawn in 1861 by Charles Minard and shows the power of presenting numbers in graphic form.

SigmaPlot is a scientific graphing program. It launches with a screen which gives the option of beginning a new piece of work or loading the last figure. Press <alt>f, n to bring down the Files menu and select new. Most functions of SigmaPlot can be controlled from drop down menus, which can be called either by mouse or <alt> and the highlighted letter of the menu item. There are shortcuts for many commands either with the function keys or <ctl> + key combinations. For help with this use the keyboard template.

Data can be entered directly into the worksheet (if you are in the graphics page exit by pressing F4) or it can be imported from Lotus 123 or an ASCII file. Some thought should be given to the final appearance of the graph so that the worksheet can be organized appropriately. It is most common for data to be plotted as X against Y or X against row number. From one worksheet several graphs can be built, and each graph can contain a number of plots. The raw data can be altered if necessary through Math transformations.

Once the data has been entered, a graph can be built with the Compose menu's Create Graph option. Selection of many menu items will result in a dialogue box which is filled with skill testing questions. Many of these can be ignored, resulting in the selection of SigmaPlot's default values. The Create New Graph dialogue box assumes a Cartesian graph, the Plot Design Summary, defaults to a scatter/line plot. It is a good idea to give the graph and its plots names in order to reduce later confusion. If nothing else you must Pick XY Columns and pick X vs Y, X vs row or whatever. Following that, click <worksheet> and then click the column(s) as appropriate. After the last one click <esc> to end column selection. It is important to click the <OK> box at the end of each dialogue box, or else no changes will take effect.

To look at the figure press <F7> for a screen plot. Pressing <ctl> Z allows you to zoom in and out on the graph page. Labels should be left to the last since they greatly slow down screen plotting. At this point axes can be altered or a second graph could be created. Note that the default is for each graph to have the same location on the page. Either new locations need to be specified in the Graph Design Summary or each superimposed graph will have to be dragged to its correct location. Clicking the graph with the mouse will pop up little black ``handles'' with which the graph can be dragged about or altered in shape. Double clicking the graph will bring up the Graph Design Summary.

The Plot and Axis menus allow control over many aspects of the final figure, some of which are also accessible directly via ``hot keys''. These include plot type, XY columns, axes, scale type and range, ticks and grids, breaks, regressions and error bars, line width, symbols and bar width and fill. Note that a line width of about .5mm should be used for everything if slides are being made from the hardcopy. Pressing <ctl>T selects text mode, which allows text to be entered on the figure. Locate the mouse cursor as desired, click the left button, and type in the label. The - and + keys allow control of letter size and pressing <pagedown> causes rotation through 900 increments. Some symbols can be typed by pressing <alt> and the three digit ASCII code for it. For example <alt>230 produces a µ. When zoomed in, labels are anchored relative to the graph, when zoomed out relative to the page. <ctl>B selects object mode which allows individual graph elements, whole graphs or the entire page to be selected with the mouse and moved about or altered.

As with any computer activity it is important to save regularly. Your file will need to be given a name and drive destination under File, save as ... From then on periodic saves can be made by pressing <ctl>S. A hard copy can be made by pressing <F8>. This will take up to ten minutes, depending on line width and the complexity of the page. Under the File menu's Extract Template selected parameters of a graph can be saved in order to be reused in other graphs. The Quit command is also under the File menu. Help is available on line by pressing F1. These notes are not intended as a replacement for the manual which you should spend some time with!