What is best free software for 3D plots?

[FF]

3D plots do not work with Mathcad 14 on Windows 8. What is the best free software that can be used easily to import a matrix from Mathcad and create and export a 3D plot to display in PowerPoint?

[StuartBruff]

F. Felber wrote:

3D plots do not work with Mathcad 14 on Windows 8. What is the best free software that can be used easily to import a matrix from Mathcad and create and export a 3D plot to display in PowerPoint?

If you've got PowerPoint (?), then you could export it to Excel. gnuplot seems to be well regarded and is free. I know a couple of applications use gnuplot as their plotting package. If there's a dll version of it then it might be possible to insert it as a scriptable object in Mathcad.

Stuart

[FF]

Thank you, Stuart. I tried GnuPlot and SCaVis. Both are for computer and Java geeks. I want something as simple as Graphing Calculator 3D is (or as Mathcad was), but with the ability to import and plot directly from large matrices. I would even be willing to pay, say, $100, but not $400 to $1000, which is what big graphing packages cost.

[dschenken]

Excel, FreeMat, and R come to mind, but there are some others.

Here's a link to an image search for R 3D plots https://www.google.com/search?q=3d+plots+in+R&biw=1280&bih=679&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=2xiaVNDUJ8WegwScu4HQCw&ved=0CDcQsAQ

Here's a link to an image search for FreeMat 3D plots https://www.google.com/search?q=3d+plots+in+R&biw=1280&bih=679&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=2xiaVNDUJ8WegwScu4HQCw&ved=0CDcQsAQ#tbm=isch&q=3d+plots+in+freemat

From http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/40770/recommended-free-software-to-plot-points-in-3d

1. Gnuplot, with a very interesting not so frequently asked questions here, fit is easily obtained. Nice outputs to PDF and LaTeX
2. Matplotlib: requires Python, so that's probably not your best option if you need to produce graphs quickly, but if you are thinking about a long term solution, I would go for this one,
3. R, normally for statistical computations, but quite nice plotting possibilities. Also, it is a software which is intended to read data in files, so it has very powerful and easy to use functions to import CSV files and the likes,
4. Octave not a big fan. Don't know the new major release, though. Previous releases were based on Gnuplot for the graphic part,
5. Scilab has continuously grown throughout the years, so as to become a monster now. Not a big fan either.

also on same page

SCaVis http://jwork.org/scavis/

Graphing Calculator 3D http://www.runiter.com/graphing-calculator/ (Not free, but very pretty, limited trial and very limited free version)

From http://www.doka.ch/Excel3Dscatterplot.htm

free Excel scatterplot software http://www.doka.ch/Excel3Dscatterplotv2_1.zip

[VladimirN]

David,

Thank you for this information.

[FF]

More specifically, I've got an 8000-element vector at 64 successive time steps, that is, an 8000x64 matrix, to display in a surface plot or contour plot, using Windows 8, Mathcad 14, Excel and PowerPoint, and whatever other software I need. What else do I need?

[StuartBruff]

Can you save the file in csv or Excel format and use the 3D print in Excel?

Stuart

[FF]

Yes, the Mathcad prn file can be opened in Excel, and a 3D surface plot can be generated by Excel. Formatting options are extremely limited. And with thousands of points in one direction, the graph is squeezed in the other direction practically to a plane, and can't be expanded by more than a factor of 20. When the 3D plots were working on Mathcad, there were loads of formatting options.