Origin, and its deluxe version OriginPro, are powerful and extremely versatile data analysis and graphics packages, designed for users in all fields of experimental and theoretical sciences. At the forefront of OriginPro’s advantages is its ease of use and minimal learning curve, making it easy to quickly start producing publication quality graphs. The spreadsheet-based user interface is intuitive and simple to navigate, and includes many “one-click” buttons for creating or manipulating datasets and plots. Streamlined productivity is an integral aspect of OriginPro with analysis templates, user-defined custom reports, and stylistic themes, so that reproducing results with different datasets is effortless. The depth of OriginPro’s capabilities is powerfully extensible, with both a scripting language and a C-like programming language, enabling you to perform nearly any type of analysis not already provided. OriginPro offers very powerful options to import from popular data formats such as Microsoft Excel, NI DIAdem DAT/TDM/TDMS, pCLAMP, and Matlab (just to name a few), and export graphs, images, data, and reports in a variety of file formats. OriginPro also has a comprehensive list of advanced technical features including linear and nonlinear curve-fitting to user-defined functions, baseline and peak analysis, statistical analysis, signal processing, image processing, and batch mode data analysis. Finally, OriginPro offers an extensive library of graphical visualizations (over 70 built-in graph types) that can operate with ease on very large datasets.
OriginLab has recently released the latest version (8.5.1) of Origin and OriginPro, which has delivered a wealth of new functionality to their already impressive repertoire. OriginPro 8.5.1’s new feature list includes tools for ROI-based statistical analysis on specific parts of a graph, surface-fitting with multiple peaks, new data import/export options, and significant improvements to error bar plotting, color palettes, and nonlinear parameter fitting. One new feature that we found exceptional was a tool to import data from digitized images of graphs (e.g. photocopies, faxes, or scanned images).
Disadvantages or weaknesses are difficult to find in OriginPro - at first blush the most obvious negative is its restriction to Windows environments, but fortunately, it does run gracefully on a Mac with Parallels or Bootcamp. Another drawback is that OriginPro's commercial base price is more than double that of its nearest competitors (Igor Pro, SigmaPlot, and Prism); however, the academic and student licenses are priced comparably to competing packages. There are a few specific features that we felt could be improved: limited and awkward undo/redo functionality, non-intuitive insertion of formulas into spreadsheets, and lack of bootstrap estimates on variances of fitted parameters, but overall these were relatively minor deficiencies compared to the package’s strengths.
Data analysis, statistics, and graphical visualizations are pivotal components in the field of research and in our opinion, OriginLab is leading the way in delivering these functionalities to its users. OriginPro’s ease of use coupled with its impressive list of capabilities make it stand out from its competitors, thereby maintaining its status as one of the most comprehensive data analysis and graphical packages. Typically the more powerful a software package is, the harder it is to use, but OriginLab has effectively solved this problem. In these regards, OriginLab has been successful in merging the needs of both average users who need to produce relatively standard plots quickly and more advanced users who require specialized analyses. In our opinion, OriginPro is a significant addition to any researcher’s set of scientific analysis and illustration tools. We recommend it!
Guangxing Li
Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of Ophthalmology
McGill University
Canada
PhD Candidate
Department of Biomedical Engineering
McGill University