Hi,

I'm writing up my MSc dissertation and need to create graphs of my results. Not complex ones but I do need error bars and Excel (2008 for Mac) is being a nightmare! I've done a fair bit of googling which suggests that Excel 2008 is not good for graphing and that it's not actually possible to do what I want to do, which is simply to create custom error bars for each condition (I have 4) based on the SEM for that condition - it's been driving me nuts as it keeps applying the same error bars to all conditions, or adding together SEM values to create a huge one which it then applies to all the bars.

Apart from Excel, are there programs out there I could download which are cheap/free and easy to use to do this? I've looked at some which are free but they seem to require coding - ok maybe I could learn this but I've not got a huge amount of time, don't need that many graphs and don't want to spend ages learning the code and faffing around (I don't really have much programming experience) just to do a couple of graphs. I'm more thinking something like Excel but with the functionality to actually do what I want. Or are other versions of Excel better? I am going to have a look on the uni computers tomorrow but I don't live close to the uni so would really prefer something I can use at home, and money is tight atm so something that doesn't cost a lot would be better (again, not really wanting to pay loads to create a couple of graphs).

Thanks!

I use GraphPad Prism, which is really easy to use, but unfortunately I don't know how much it costs as the university provides it so they pay the license, I just have to put in a new code every year. Has your uni not got a computing services page where you might be able to see if they offer something similar for free to registered students? Thats how I got GraphPad, its available on the uni networked computers so they make it available to those working from home etc by requesting the download using our logins.

Best Wishes
Trin

Thanks Trin! I have just found that my university doesn't offer anything beyond Matlab and SPSS which I already have. However, GraphPad is about $100 to buy (too much atm) but is available as a free demo for 30 days which is all I need it for (and I presume you can export graphs once created so they're not going to vanish).

I copy and paste the graphs into word/powerpoint just in case as well. You can export graphs into a few different file types as well.