• The Notebook—the basic SigmaPlot File with its multiple sections, sheets, and reports
• Importing data—methods for entering data, linking to Excel, filtering and arranging rows and columns, setting up worksheets with replicates and custom data series
• Overview of menus, toolbars, worksheets and default settings—a quick tour of the most common toolbar items; manipulating data within the worksheet and setting user defined preferences and defaults
• Using the Graph Wizard—Choosing the right graph types—simple XY scatter plots, line graphs, box plots, three dimensional graphs and others

• Axis breaks—creating multiple X or Y axes
• Formatting the datasets; changing the settings for the symbols, lines, fills, etc.—creating custom color and pattern schemes with graphic cells
• Working with axis settings; adding more axes—reference lines and custom axes
• Creating PowerPoint presentations and placing graphs into Word documents
• Creating a gallery of graph style templates
• Arranging multiple graphs and objects on the page layout
• Using Macros and automation techniques

• An overview of the terms used in analyzing data such as significance, normality, error, and confidence.
• Checking data for normality or symmetry—looking at the distribution of the data with histograms and box plots.
• Descriptive statistics—a look at the basic statistics such as mean, median, standard deviation, standard error, confidence, coefficient of variation and how they are related.
• Performing comparison tests with paired datasets and repeated measures

• Searching for trends—linear regression and how it compares to correlation
• Fitting data to known models—looking at the most common nonlinear methods; comparing models; comparing best fit parameters from datasets; constraining parameters.
• Data manipulation—transforming and normalizing data
• Simulating data and creating theoretical curves with the "Plot Equation" feature
• Creating standard curves to derive unknown X and Y values

January 2006