OriginLab Releases Origin 8

By DE Editors

OriginLab Corporation (Northampton, MA) on Monday released the Windows-based analysis and graphing software Origin 8. After 15 years, Origin 8 now offers a completely new workbook as the centerpiece of the Origin workspace.

"For Origin 8, we have nearly revamped the entire application, making significant improvements in how data, graphs, and analysis results are created, explored, and organized. Just for starters, our implementation of Edward Tufte’s sparklines in our new workbooks will allow users to quickly and easily get a feel for their worksheet data," says OriginLab founder and President Dr. C.P. Yang.

The sparklines, which are special embedded graphs located in column headers, provide small profiles of the column’s data. To see other trends within data, the aspect ratio of column sparklines can be changed by altering the column width or row height.

A new capability in Origin 8 allows analysis results to be automatically placed into a worksheet within the raw data's workbook, so that parameter values, statistics, and related analysis graphs are available when looking at the original data.

Users can create customized reports with rich text cell formatting and cell borders, which can also be saved as templates for future analysis. Origin’s workbooks can even contain graphs and images within cells.

Price: $850 (commercial seat); $500 (educational seat). OriginPro 8: $1,250 (commercial seat); $700 (educational seat). Upgrades from Origin 7 or Origin 7.5 to Origin 8: $255 (commercial seat); $150 (educational seat). For more information, click here.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company's website.