IGOR Pro

Igor is the way. The program is fast, the language is easy to learn since menu options generate command line equivalents that can be copied into scripts, which can in turn be made into functions. If you work on large datasets with similar structures, Igor will make the impossible feasible through incredible job batching power. I can't remember the last time it crashed - and sometimes, I have it working for days. Even the GUI generation system is friendly and very intuitive. Besides what often seems like unlimited flexibility, the wavemetrics team is always available and incredibly responsive to user needs. I've never worked with a company that showed so much dedication to support, free of cost. They have a great mailing list and good documentation. 3 years of using it: no complaints, only great surprises and continued amazement at how I am able to evolve the Igor environment to suit my needs.

Very versatile program that will make any graph you need for scientific use. Superb set of built in tools that are easy to extend. There is a command line that greatly increases the versatility, and in essence it records what you do with the GUI interface for analysis and plot formatting, so doing a sequence several times becomes as easy as selecting a few lines in the command window and hitting enter. Igor has been around forever, and is still supported and improved continuously. I believe it was at the 68k to PPC transition that Wavemetrics gave everyone a FREE version upgrade recompiled for PPC, and I told them "I'm a customer for life". There are a few nits to pick. The interface is old in some ways and occasionally it is excessively modal. It could use a top to bottom clean up of some of those areas, such as some of the very complicated dialog boxes, the modalities that occur when a graphics window has the "tools" shown, etc. Some of the windows for browsing waves have needlessly small scrolling areas, so life gets annoying when you have lots of data waves. However, this program will let you easily do just about anything you want with numerical data, and then present it in a nice form.

It is difficult to describe how powerful IGOR Pro is, but it might suffice to say it has built-in capabilities to do just about anything (certainly, to match the capabilities of any of the other packages that cost three times as much). If by some miracle you find something it cannot do, you can write your own code to achieve it. The main selling points for me are: 1. Supremely robust architecture on both Windows and Mac. You get both platforms for one purchase price. 2. Price. IGOR licenses are easily 1/3 the price of other leading data processing software. 3. Liberal license. Unlike other software vendors, IGOR does not require that you jump through ten hoops and to validate a license via the internet to use your license. It operates mostly on the honor system, and it does not hamper the user's access to the software. You paid for it, you use it! 4. Superb documentation. IGOR's documentation is unrivaled in thoroughness and clarity. 5. Responsive developers. Wavemetrics stands behind IGOR completely. They answer all user queries immediately and constantly improve IGOR. 6. The best community support on the planet. With the IGOR email list, any question is usually answered within minutes even if it is as trivial yet convoluted as ordering pizza (see comment below). IGOR Pro is by far the best value in data processing software. I am biased. I have worked for the company, and I have been using it for over a decade, but I am certain that no one will reach any other conclusion after giving it a sincere try.

"I've yet to find anything that Igor cannot do. Get me a coffee maker with a USB socket, and I'll get it to make coffee!" One of the best things about Igor Pro is its user mailing list. Absolutely amazing support from the Wavemetrics people as well as other users, not only for Igor-specific things but for domain-specific problems in the technical fields. I once complained, tongue-in-cheek, that Igor couldn't automatically order pizza. The very next day, a user posted a small program that did exactly that, ordering at a preset time from Papa John's.

How does this compare to Pro Fit lately?

Amazing software at a very fair price. I came from a background of C++ and found Igor was very simple to pick up and extremely flexible. The support is great and the manual is extremely thorough, walking you through using the GUI and through advanced programming.

I've been using this software for about six months now, and I'm yet to find fault with it. The hybrid interface is fantastic, it lets you see exactly what the program is doing, to the extent that you can easily replicate any sequence of operations from the GUI in a procedure - without the unreliable and awkward script-recording found in other programs. The interface (on both Mac and Windows) is blazing fast, clear and well designed. Graphs are almost publication-quality out of the box, and can be tweaked with extreme precision. It is sufficiently fast to run well on older computers. I've yet to find anything that Igor cannot do. Get me a coffee maker with a USB socket, and I'll get it to make coffee! Igor is insanely under priced and undiscovered considering it's capabilities and quality. The one thing I found necessary was to spend some time building a set of procedures to do some fairly basic stuff that could be done out of the box. The way I work involves manipulating windows full of waves, and I had to write a couple of scripts to manipulate everything in a window at once - I don't think it would be too hard to include this kind of thing in the main distribution. Also, it's worth bearing in mind that if you want to deal with external hardware you'll need Igor's XOP toolkit extension, which I thought to be a little over-priced.

I can wholeheartedly second every aspect of Toryalai Heart's review. In addition, Igor is the only graphing package I am aware of that allows me to fine-tune the layout of a graph presenting scientific data to journal-quality standards. Unfortunately, because of the prevalence of Excel, a lot of data these days gets presented in aesthetically displeasing laid-out graphs. Igor, however, gives the same control back to the user scientists had back in the day when they would send data to specialized graphic artists, before submitting to a journal. My rating of five for "Ease of Use" has to be understood in context. This does not mean that the program is easy to use by someone who has never done any data analysis or built a graph from given data. Rather, it represents the logical, makes-sense, connection between the way Igor uses the dialogs of the OS's GUI to build the commands of its programming language. Once one has built those commands, they are easy to tweak on the language level and then re-executed, which saves a lot of time over having to re-specify parameters modified only slightly, via the GUI.

Igor is the way. The program is fast, the language is easy to learn since menu options generate command line equivalents that can be copied into scripts, which can in turn be made into functions. If you work on large datasets with similar structures, Igor will make the impossible feasible through incredible job batching power. I can't remember the last time it crashed - and sometimes, I have it working for days. Even the GUI generation system is friendly and very intuitive. Besides what often seems like unlimited flexibility, the wavemetrics team is always available and incredibly responsive to user needs. I've never worked with a company that showed so much dedication to support, free of cost. They have a great mailing list and good documentation. 3 years of using it: no complaints, only great surprises and continued amazement at how I am able to evolve the Igor environment to suit my needs.