About This Guide

Partial Table-of-Contents

This guide presents a "hands on" introduction to Data Explorer and is designed to help you start working with it immediately.

• Chapter 1. "A Very Quick Overview", is a 2-page summary of the Data Explorer system and its main features. The purpose of this overview is to give you a clear general outline of the Data Explorer tools and interfaces and of their functions in the process of visualizing data.
• Chapter 2. "Tutorial I: Using Data Explorer", covers most of the basic functions of Data Explorer--at a level accessible to any new user. It briefly introduces the Visual Program Editor (VPE) before concentrating on the Image Window--the user interface for directly presenting and manipulating the images generated by visual programs.
• Chapter 3. "Tutorial II: Editing and Creating Visual Programs", uses step-by-step examples to illustrate the use of the VPE in the more advanced tasks of creating and modifying visual programs. (Chapter 3. "Tutorial II: Editing and Creating Visual Programs" also includes a list of the sample visual programs supplied with Data Explorer.)
• Chapter 5. "Importing Data", explains how to import data into Data Explorer, using the Data Prompter and its companion file-viewing facility, the Data Browser.

A Suggestion on Where to Start

If you have never used Data Explorer before, read Chapter 1. "A Very Quick Overview" and then start on the tutorials. If you are familiar with Data Explorer, you may want to focus on sample programs that involve the kind of visualization tasks you encounter in your own work. For that purpose, Chapter 4. "Sample Visual Programs and Sample Macros", lists the sample visual programs and macros supplied with Data Explorer.

You can follow the tutorials in this Guide or on-line. To use the on-line version,

• type dx -tutor and press the Enter key, or
• Choose Run Tutorial from the Data Explorer Startup window.