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Overview
Due primarily to its widespread availability, Microsoft Excel is often the de facto choice of engineers and scientists in need of software for measurement data analysis and manipulation. Microsoft
Excel lends itself well to extremely simple test and measurement applications and the financial uses for which it was designed; however, in an era when companies are forced to do more with less,
choosing the appropriate tools to maximize efficiency (thereby reducing costs) is imperative. Just because Microsoft Excel is already installed on your computer does not make it the right tool for
every job.
National Instruments DIAdem software which was specifically created for the management, inspection, analysis, and reporting of acquired or simulated engineering and scientific data offers
efficiency gains and scalability with features that overcome the limitations of Excel in most data post-processing applications.
Table of Contents
1. Differences in Fundamental Building Blocks: Cells versus Channels
2. Hundreds of Engineering and Scientific Analysis Calculations
3. Loading and Manipulating Large Volumes of Data
4. Flexibility in File Storage Format
5. Built-In Tools for Data Management and Trending
6. Data Inspection and Synchronization
7. What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG) Reporting Templates
8. Interactive Automation
9. Excel is Free, Yet Too Costly to Use
10. Learn More and Move to DIAdem Today
Figure 1. Microsoft Excel uses the cell as its fundamental building block. Even simple data analysis must be applied to a cell and then repeated for all cells in a column (channel).
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Figure 1. Microsoft Excel uses the cell as its fundamental building block. Even simple data analysis must be applied to a cell and then repeated for all cells in a column (channel).
Figure 2. NI DIAdem operates with the building block of a channel. Averaging is as simple as dragging-and-dropping entire data channels instead of unnecessarily manipulating individual data
points.
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Figure 3. Microsoft Excel provides an exhaustive set of finance-based calculations and allows engineers to write their own code to meet their application needs.
In DIAdem, hundreds of engineering and scientific analysis calculations from simple addition to complex matrix manipulation and order analysis have been included in the environment. The
analysis functions in DIAdem are configuration-based; no programming is required to run even complex analysis such as Digital Filtering, as shown in Figure 4. Additionally, DIAdem analysis
functions include full previews of analysis results so that you can avoid erroneous calculations by ensuring that youre using the correct parameters prior to running each calculation.
Figure 4. DIAdem includes hundreds of analysis functions specific to scientists and engineers. Each calculation is configuration-based and provides a preview of resultant channels so that you
can interact with parameters to ensure accuracy and reduce errors.
DIAdem also includes a framework for creating your own domain-specific calculations called the Calculation Manager, and it includes an integrated Visual Basic scripting interface for sequencing
built-in DIAdem calculations or defining your own custom calculations.
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Data streaming speeds of common applications reach or exceed MS/s rates. In an application that collects one single channel of data at 1 MS/s, a total of 1,000,000 data points will be collected in
a one second acquisition. In a matter of minutes, billions of data points can be saved to gigabytes of hard drive space.
When Microsoft Excel attempts to load a data file containing a large volume of data, it attempts to load every single data point into memory. With the release of the 64-bit version of Microsoft Excel
2010, this is less of a limitation, as the application has a larger addressable memory space; however, loading the entirety of a large data set into Excel can often take many minutes due to the
sheer volume of data that needs to be loaded. Furthermore, Excel stores not just numerical values in each cell but also numeric formatting, cell formatting, formulas, spreadsheet links, Internet
hyperlinks, and comments. This cell-centric flexibility is ideal for business spreadsheets where cell-level visibility is key, but it adds unnecessary memory overhead for data sets with millions of
values. To avoid potential memory problems, Excel imposes a limit on the maximum number of rows and columns. The introduction of Excel 2007 increased the total number of rows per
worksheet from 65,536 to just over 1,000,000 (2 20, to be precise) and the total number of columns from 256 to 16,384 (2 14). Using Figures 5 and 6, contrast Excel's row and column limitation
with DIAdem's ability to manipulate 500,000,000 rows (points) as only a fraction of its limitation.
Figure 5. Excel can only load just over 1 million rows of data for any given column. This is a limitation for scientists and engineers.
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Figure 6. DIAdem can easily handle extremely large data sets. This image shows an example of 500,000,000 (one-half Billion) data points in a channel - 500 times the maximum number of rows
allowed by Excel.
As shown in Figure 5, an acquisition rate of 1 MS/s using one single channel would exceed the number of data points that Excel
could load in just over one second of acquisition. Many engineers and scientists feel forced to allow the limitations of their data
post-processing software to dictate the terms of their acquisition and either reduce acquisition rates or segment acquisitions
across numerous data files, introducing a nightmare for data management and organization.
DIAdem was designed to manipulate measurement data in both small and large volumes, and can process up to 2,000,000,000 data points (2 31) per channel across 65,536 (216) total data
channels. Additionally, DIAdem includes selective loading, data reduction and register loading features specifically designed for working with extremely large data sets.
DIAdem can selectively load a subset of the data channels contained in a data file, whereas Excel always imports all of the columns from a data file. If you only need to load 1 channel from a very
large data file with 10 channels in it, loading only the 10% of the data values that you actually need is much faster and more efficient than Excel's method of loading 100% of the data when 90% is
overhead.
When files are loaded with data reduction, DIAdem loads data from a selected row range and/or condenses every N rows into one representative value, whereas Excel always loads all the data
rows.
When files are register loaded, DIAdem uses the existing data file on disk as in-place virtual memoryDIAdem does not load all the values from the data file at once but instead registers how to
access blocks of data values on-demand. This makes register loaded channels read-only, but it enables very quick graphing and inspection of extremely large data sets, as shown in Figure 6.
View a user solution on how DIAdem is processing massive amounts of data to help predict and monitor earthquake activity.
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Table 1. There are many file format options available, but binary file formats such as TDMS are the only formats that are high-speed streaming capable. *May require a toolkit or add-on module.
DIAdem is flexible enough to read any custom file format including customized binary file formats due to modular pieces of code called DataPlugins that know how to parse and interpret the
contents of a data file. DataPlugins also reformat the parsed data from the particular data file into a common data structure inside DIAdem, which makes it easy to compare data loaded from
different file formats. National Instruments has published free downloadable DataPlugins for hundreds of the most commonly used data file formats, and there are published APIs for LabVIEW and
VBScript for you to create DataPlugins for your own legacy data files. This enables DIAdem to be modular and scalable enough to handle any current, legacy, or future data file format choices.
By contrast, while Excel can read ASCII files, it is usually completely unable to load data from binary files. Even when Excel successfully loads an ASCII file, it has limited ability to correctly
interpret the property and channel structure of the data file. Too often, time-consuming reformatting of the imported ASCII data is necessary before it can be used at all.
One exception to this problem is the TDMS file format from National Instruments, which Excel loads with correct formatting of the structure, properties, and data from the TDMS file, using the free
TDM Excel Add-In.
Visit the TDMS homepage to learn more about the TDMS file format for storing measurement data to disk.
Figure 7. In this query, the DataFinder has located data channels across all data files that were collected using a J-Type thermocouple and stored to disk by Jennifer, the operator.
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Figure 7. In this query, the DataFinder has located data channels across all data files that were collected using a J-Type thermocouple and stored to disk by Jennifer, the operator.
View a webcast demonstrating DIAdem and the NI DataFinder for data management, analysis, and reporting.
Figure 8. Using DIAdem, you can fully synchronize the playback of measurement data, sound data, GPS coordinates, video, and more .
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Figure 9. DIAdem features a WYSIWYG report editor publication-ready exported reports will look identical to their edit-time templates.
8. Interactive Automation
Excel provides a powerful environment for the development of macros. Using recording mode, it is possible to interactively record macros that automate lengthy evaluations or calculations.
DIAdem similarly features an integrated VBScript editor, a user dialog editor, and a script recorder to interactively generate scripts that automate lengthy evaluations or calculations. Using
scripting, the entire DIAdem environment can be customized and automated so that repetitive data workflow processes that used to take days can be accomplished in a matter of minutes. This
truly maximizes the efficiency of engineers and scientists and dramatically reduces the time it takes them to turn raw measurement data into usable information.
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Table 2. DIAdem will increase your efficiency by overcoming the limitations of Microsoft Excel.
[1] "Forrester: Microsoft Office in No Danger From Competitors - PC World Business Center." http://www.pcworld.com. 2009-06-04. Retrieved 2009-12-19.
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