Presentation Graphics: An Introduction and Review of Four Systems

Abstract

Anyone who presents numeric data visually for a scientific paper or conference knows how hard it can be to obtain good graphics. Even if you are fortunate enough to have a medical illustrations department in your institution, it still takes your time to sketch and label the axes, and secretarial or technician time to plot the points. Then you wait. Three weeks is not rare at our institution. If you find an error, or want a different look, you wait again. The service can be expensive, and provides no opportunity for experimentation. Doing it yourself does not solve the problem. Just imagine asking an employee to throw away he finished product and try again with the X and Y axes reversed after it has taken five hours and ten restarts to get the current product. If you have ever faced these problems in presenting your data in graphic form, you should know about presentation graphics program.