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I was given the task of finding a way to graph my company's manufacturing data from each batch of material (specifically density) with an overlay of process changes in some sort of timeline format. It needs to be easy for an end user to add new data and events. Doing a google search I found timeplot, which seems to do exactly the sort of thing I'm looking for.

My only issue with it is it seems to only be able to plot continuous data. I want to be able to have a scatter plot of my material properties with events similar to how timeplot implements them. From their example on that page, the plot information looks like this:

var plotInfo1 = [
        Timeplot.createPlotInfo({
            id: "Population",
            dataSource: dataSource2,
            timeGeometry: timeGeometry,
            valueGeometry: geometry2,
            lineColor: green,
            dotColor: lightGreen,
            showValues: true
        }),
        Timeplot.createPlotInfo({
            id: "Immigration",
            dataSource: dataSource1,
            timeGeometry: timeGeometry,
            valueGeometry: geometry1,
            lineColor: blue,
            dotColor: blue,
            showValues: true
        }),
        Timeplot.createPlotInfo({
            id: "Events",
            eventSource: eventSource1,
            timeGeometry: timeGeometry,
            lineColor: red
        })
    ];

Well, almost like that I switched around the event sources in my testing. Looking at the api script for this, it looks like I should be able to edit the lineWidth. But adding that parameter makes the script no longer plot anything.

Is there a way to do what I want? Is there a better tool for this? I was planning on writing a VBA macro to extract all my data from some excel files and dump them into the proper text and XML formats this application needs.

AndrewK
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  • I fiddled around with simile a while back. The plus is that you can make timelines with very cool features: scroll backward and forward in time, mouse over an event and have details pop up, etc. It seemed like the learning curve was fairly high --- maybe with more effort I would have developed proficiency. Is there a reason you're not using in Excel, R, matlab, or some other common data analysis package. – xidgel Aug 20 '15 at 04:12
  • The only reason I'm using this is because I found it before I found how to get similar features working in Excel. The clicking for more info and two event types already there is not something I know how to do in Excel. – AndrewK Aug 20 '15 at 11:26
  • Check [this](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4700419/alternative-to-simile-timeline-for-timeline-visualization?rq=1) related link – xidgel Aug 20 '15 at 15:29

0 Answers0