It turns out I was an engineer all along

[jurph]

Old and busted: MS Excel

New Hotness: MATLAB scripts for parsing giant tab-delimited TXT files, grinding a few conversion factors, and plotting everything in pretty colors with an intelligent legend.

Next Week's Hotness: Perl batch scripts for executing the proprietary modeling-and-simulation code, immediately followed by running MATLAB functions

Comments

[mantis_tobogan]

eff tab delimiting! comma seperated values is where it's at!

[jurph]

I'm sure it is, but this code is a proprietary binary -- I'm lucky the output is ASCII text at all.

[jurph]

...and the computers I'm working on, I'm not allowed to install anything.

[unprotoize]

Powerpoint brings all hotness potential to a grinding halt. In fact, it might even be argued that it retroactively strips whatever hotness might have been present earlier in the game.

[jurph]

It is, unfortunately, the new Greek. If you don't speak it, people (mistakenly) believe you can't communicate. A hallmark of my new job is that very few of us put words on PPT slides - just graphics with obscure numbers and letters representing big dangerous stuff.

[chaosinaskirt]

you can export FIGs into JPGs using export (in the figure window, under file / export) or print (in an .m file) but i usually do BMPs or PNGs

the command line to do it for figure 1 (for JPG, BMP, and PNGs respectively) are:
print -f1 -r600 -djpeg100 figure1.jpg
print -f1 -dbitmap figure1.bmp
print -f1 -dpng figure1.png

there's a way to automatically insert them into powerpoint using vbscript, as well, but i can't remember off the top of my head. but basically, you have windows go to some directory, get the file names, and insert one on each page.

[jurph]

No, we're running it on plain old 32-bit WinXP, I think. I'll double check.