BugWin Charting

Here's a quick overview of the BugWin Charting options.  BugWin uses Microsoft Excel as a drawing canvas, and with the push of just a few buttons creates an outstanding publication quality graphics display which can be annotated by the user and printed to any printer supported by Windows, from small inkjets to larges plotters.  The resulting file is a standard .xls file which can be opened by anybody with Excel.  You'll love it, and so will your customers.

General Options

Sample Range - Sometimes you prefer not to plot the entire section, so just define the range of samples that you want.

Species Order - Choose between First Downhole, First Uphole, Alphabetical or by Taxon Group.

Style - Options are continuous vertical bars, discrete horizontal bars, letters or numbers to show the individual taxon abundance throughout the section.

Vertical Adjustment - Stretch or shrink your chart vertically depending on sample interval, or to match the scale of electric logs, etc.

Miscellaneous - other useful options.

Curves Options

Choose which assemblage curves (histograms) to plot, such as Total Abundance, Diversity, Total Planktic, etc.

Here you can also create and define assemblage curves and species groupings.  It's quick and easy to create a new grouping, just type in the group name into the Add Group box and hit the Add button.  The group will appear in the list above, then just right click it to bring up the definition panel (below) where you define its color, scale, and which taxa should be included in the group.

Many different grouping files may be created from different geographical locations and/or different geological ages.

Curve Attributes

Set the attributes for each curve here, such as color, histogram vs. sawtooth curve, horizontal scale type of arithmetic or log, and the maximum horizontal scale.

You can also add or delete taxa from the pop-down list provided.

Click the Preview button to get an idea of what the curve will look like when plotted from the current project.  Adjust the horizontal maximum scale as appropriate here.  This saves you from plotting the whole chart and realizing that your scale is wrong.

How to define groups of taxa to plot as a curve.

General Distribution Chart

This example of a general distribution chart shows options for first downhole occurrence, continuous vertical bars, as well as the additional alphabetical listing.  The alphabetical listing is valuable when there are many taxa on the chart and you want to find a particular taxon.  You easily find the taxon in the alphabetical list, then use the index number to find it in the actual list.

Since Excel has a complete drawing toolbox, you can easily add highlighting, or change the text color, fonts, etc. to emphasize important taxa.

E-logs

You can even draw E-logs from .las files!