MagicPlotStudent 2.9

As you have probably guessed, MagicPlot Student lets you plot data graphically. In this respect, this product was conceived as a simple plotting application for those who want to avoid the steep learning curve commonly found in other bloated tools. Luckily, it has an online and a PDF printable manual to help you find your way. Besides, there is a downloadable sample project that serves to illustrate its functions.

Using MagicPlot Student is not difficult. There is a table to which you can add the desired values, either manually or by importing them from external text files. There also are different tabs for the source data and the resulting graphs, and they are perfectly synchronized. So, any change you make in the data is instantly reflected in the corresponding graph. Likewise, you can build formulae quite easily, just like you do in Excel.

The graphs can be customized until they look exactly as you want them. Besides, you can save your adjustments as templates that you can reuse to plot other data. MagicPlot Student supports exporting each table to a separate text file. Likewise, it allows saving graphs to image files (PNG, BMP and GIF). Unfortunately, it does not allow exporting to vector image formats.

All in all, although MagicPlot Student certainly lacks some of the features you can find in many other plotting tools, it actually avoids those that are only occasionally used. This means that it has most of what a student needs for plotting and analyzing data. Although this application is based on Java (which also makes it cross-platform), it is light enough not to make it noticeably slow. It even loads quite quickly.

MagicPlot Student is a free version of a more comprehensive product called MagicPlot Pro, available in two licenses: Academic and Commercial. Thus, if you need more features, like multiple axes, color map plots and batch processing, you need to purchase the paid version instead.