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DATAPLOT Support
Introduction It is important to note that we are not a software company. Dataplot was developed to support NIST work. The good news is that we make it available to non-NIST people at no charge. The downside is that we do not provide the support services that a commerical software company would typically provide. In particular, this means there is no official support garaunteed. It is provided as I have time and support for NIST staff takes precedence over support for non-NIST staff.

The Dataplot support staff is basically me, Alan Heckert, and Dataplot support is not my full time job. I do try to respond to questions and problems, but this means that if I am on vacation or have other immediate job duties, I may not be able to respond to you as quickly as I would like.

Note that a Dataplot mail list is available. You can post questions to this list. Note that my policy is to respond to questions posted to the mail list to the mail list. However, questions sent to my e-mail address will not be cross-posted to the mail list.

Specific support issues include:

Reporting bugs If you think you have discovered a bug in Dataplot, please report it to Alan Heckert, alan.heckert@nist.gov.

It is helpful if you can narrow the problem down as much as possible. Ideally, send me a macro (and any associated data needed) that produces the bug and a description of the problem. Include what platform you are running Dataplot on and the approximate age of your Dataplot installation (you don't need to be precise, I just need to know if you are running a fairly current version or one that is several years old).

I do try to fix reported bugs as quickly as possible.

Downloading and Installation Problems If you have a problem downloading or installing Dataplot, contact Alan Heckert, alan.heckert@nist.gov.
Dataplot Consulting I divide consulting questions into two categories:
  1. How to I perform some statistical analysis with Dataplot?
  2. Can you explain some statistical technique?
In general, I try to answer questions of the first type (i.e., how do I do something in Dataplot).

Questions of the second type are less likely to get answered. Note that the Statistical Engineering Division does provide statistical consulting to NIST staff and to serve SED/NIST missions. However, we do not provide general statistical consulting to non-NIST staff.

For general statistics/consulting questions, you may want to take a look at the NIST/SEMATECH Engineering Statistics Handbook.

Requesting Enhancements to Dataplot If you would like to request an enhancement to Dataplot, contact Alan Heckert, alan.heckert@nist.gov.

We make no commitment to acting on these requests. Again, we are not a commerical software company, so enhancements that have the highest relevance for SED/NIST work will be given priority.

Enhancements may be addressed in several ways:

  • It is possible that I might be able to write a Dataplot macro to provide the functionality for a given request.

  • Requests requiring minimal implementation effort are more likely to be acted on quickly.

  • The Dataplot source code is freely downloadable, so it is in fact possible to implement your own modifications to the code. I provide some guidance on how to implement changes to the source code. Dataplot is a large program, so reading this web page will save you some time.
Date created: 02/15/2002
Last updated: 03/27/2023
Please email comments on this WWW page to alan.heckert@nist.gov.