Some Calc recipes

See also The GNU Calc Reference Card.

Quickly graphing data

A single set of ordinates

Say we have two columns of data in a GNU Emacs buffer, and we want to plot them as abscissae and ordinates; e.g.

      0.01   20.0
      0.02   0.00
      0.03   9.97
      0.04   0.15
      0.05   7.06
      0.06   0.90
      0.07   4.90
      0.08   1.68
    

1. Select the rectangle: with the cursor at the top-left, hit C-SPC to set-mark-command then move cursor to the bottom-right.
2. Then M-# r to calc-dispatch and ‘grab rectangle from a buffer’.
3. In Calc, hit v t to calc-transpose, then v u to calc-unpack the data into two row vectors.
4. Finally hit g f to calc-graph-fast. This should produce something like the following graph.

If you want a grid, issue g g (calc-graph-grid) and g p (calc-graph-plot).

Using an integer sequence as abscissae

To graph equally spaced ordinates, the abscissae aren't required: just put 0 or 1 in the second position on the GNU Calc stack before issuing calc-graph-fast.

Multiple sets of ordinates

Say we have a second set of ordinates in a third column; e.g.

      0.01   20.00   8.98
      0.02   0.00    6.64
      0.03   9.97    5.60
      0.04   0.15    4.99
      0.05   7.06    4.56
      0.06   0.90    4.25
      0.07   4.90    4.01
      0.08   1.68    3.81
    

Grab, transpose, and unpack the data as before, but then do M-2 g f to use 2 lots of ordinates. This produces the following graph. Similarly, for n+1 columns of data representing n sets of ordinates, hit M-n before calling calc-graph-fast.

Calc is slow if the data sets are large.

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